Here is some more info. Sweet potatoes are native to the Americas (Central and South America) and yams are mostly found in Africa but also in Asia.

Personally, I have never used the term "yam", but then I do not like sweet potatoes and generally avoid them.

Lars and Olychick are right. The word "yam" was applied to the local produce by people from Africa, the same way the word "robin" was applied by Englishmen to the local bird, even though they're not the same things as what they referred to in the words' places of origin.

Add to that, what's labelled "yam" in a supermarket might be a common sweet potato, not even a variety usually distinguished as such, but "yam" fit on the sign better.

The Whole Foods near me often has real yams, most often the purple or white ones, and there's no mistaking them, though some have colors in the yellow-orange range as well. The real yams do look different when you see them whole.

If your supermarket is calling something a yam and you are in the United States, there is a 99.99% chance it's a sweet potato. The grocery industry, for some reason, likes to incorrectly label certain (especially orange-fleshed) sweet potatoes as yams. The USDA actually has a requirement that, when they call them yams they must also label them as sweet potatoes. Look on the label of "canned yams." They are also, due to the USDA regulation, labeled as sweet potatoes, which is what they actually are. Grocery stores, unfortunately, quite frequently do not comply with the USDA regulation and incorrectly label fresh sweet potatoes as yams without also labeling them as what they really are...sweet potatoes. Sometimes, they label one color of sweet potato as a sweet potato and another color will be labeled as a yam. But...they are all sweet potatoes.

Anyway, you are really unlikely to see an actual yam in a grocery store in the U.S. They may be labeling them as yams, but they are sweet potatoes! :) Sweet potatoes come in many varieties, everything from white to purple.

Nope, they are not the same thing, although many people use the term "yam" for both. Here I've never heard them called yams, nor are they advertised in stores as yams, they are always sweet potatoes.

I don't think I've ever eaten a yam, although I've eaten white/yellow sweet potatoes. That's the kind that Elery always had in Tennessee when he was a kid, and he likes them, although I seldom can find them in the store(s).

Annie

Howmanykitties, you took the words right out of my mouth!
I ate yams once in Africa....and my grandmother used to call the fatter lighter colored sweet potatoes "yams"...but we know they are all the genus ipomea, while true yams are dioscorea.

I think they are all called batatas in spanish. No?

dcarch

I know the difference between a yam and a sweet potato. They really do look different side by side, and yes, we see real honest to goodness yams (Asian, I think) at the grocery store! We also get tamarind pods, cherimoya, nopales, dragonfruit, plantains, dragon beans, Korean pears, etc. I don't know the percentage of grocery stores that carry yams that are really yams, but it's greater than nil, and I'd guess more than 0.01% as well, unless you're including convenience stores, liquor stores (dairy stores? I think that varies state by state. Most liquor stores here have groceries as well) and farm stands.

I'll bet you are seeing purple sweet potatoes.

https://www.superfoodly.com/how-to-cook-purple-sweet-potato-recipe-nutrition-benefits/

I suspect that whole foods also incorrectly labels some sweet potatoes as yams. I'm including a link to whole foods market, where they list and discuss different vegetables. If you scroll down to "Sweet Potatoes, Yams" and click on it, you go to their description. The description states, "There are two basic types of sweet potato: moist (orange-fleshed) and dry (yellow-fleshed). The moist-fleshed potatoes are often called "yams." (The true yam is large--up to 100 pounds--and is grown in Africa and Asia but rarely seen in the western world. However, common usage has made the term "yams" acceptable when referring to the orange sweet potato)..."

http://m.wholefoodsmarket.com/recipes/food-guides/guide-vegetables

I tried to tell a grocery store employee at my local, large-chain, grocery store that their new practice of labeling some of their sweet potatoes as "yams" was confusing and that they were all sweet potatoes. She actually became hostile and argumentative, raising her voice and practically yelling at me repeatedly, "YOU'RE WRONG." She told me, in no uncertain terms, that I was WRONG and that the orange sweet potatoes I was holding were not sweet potatoes. "You're WRONG, those are YAMS," she practically yelled at me, concluding with, "The white ones are sweet potatoes!" She wouldn't listen to a word I said. I was shocked by her behavior and considered contacting store management over it, but then decided just to let it go, for now. BTW, I was not wrong. I was holding Garnet sweet potatoes.

I don't believe I have ever seen a Yam. Some years we grow some really nice sweet potatoes in our garden. I have never called sweet potatoes yams.

Sue

If you have a large chinese, korean, japanese population in your city, you can find yams in the asian markets.

In S FL where I'm from, all the Caribbean root vegetables are everywhere, in grocery stores, at the flea market, green market, etc. There are always huge piles of giant roots to choose from.

To my mom, a yam and a sweet potato were the same thing. Her family was from New England. But the only time we ever really used the word "yam" was when talking about candied yams.

I've also found taro root in the markets here (especially Japanese) and use it sometimes when I make Okonomiyaki, but I've not looked for yams. I grow my own cherimoya and dragonfruit, and got my first dragonfruit this year from a plant I've had for five years. I briefly had a tamarind tree (which I grew from a seed I found in some tamarind paste), and it was pretty, but they get to be huge, and I did not have room for it.

You can buy yams in Los Angeles at African Produce Central Market, and supposedly at a Jamaican market, according to the L.A. Times.

I have read that you can find real yams in some ethnic markets, usually in larger cities. I've personally never seen a yam. I'd be really interested to try one. :) But, since sweet potatoes are more nutrient dense than yams, I'd probably have to stick to mostly eating sweet potatoes vs yams.

There are some sweet potatoes with dark purple flesh and I've never had one of those. It's my understanding that they are high in antioxidants. I keep hoping they will appear in my grocery store, so I can try one. I may eventually try to grow some in my (small) veggie garden.

Thanks for all the helpful responses! Being from New England, I guess as far as I am concerned they are the same. I have only seen canned Yams, never the fresh produce.

I have only seen canned Yams,

And they are also sweet potatoes, unless you are looking at ethnic brands.

Yes, a garnet sweet potato is a sweet potato. And yes, Whole Foods stocks both those and also varieties of sweet potato that are often called "yams" because of the enduring borrow of the word. Some of us still say "starfish" too, though they teach the children that it's wrong.

I repeat. I know the difference. My local store often (seasonally) has real, honest to goodness, yams, which I'm pretty sure are from Asia, but might be Asian style ones grown in the Americas. You saw the produce in your store, and I believe you when you say you were right, but *I* see the produce where I shop and I am NOT wrong. Perhaps it's because of the traditionally Asian neighborhood it's in. As has been said, they're also easily found at ethnic markets (of which we have a greater number than supermarkets). I find your insistence that I must be wrong overwrought.

I bought purple sweet potatoes once, but it wasn't a purply-purple like a purple regular potato is. More of a brownish purple inside, but I don't know if that's just that variety.

I'm not insisting you're wrong :)

I'm just saying that whole foods is also calling things yams, when they are actually sweet potatoes. At least they seem to know this and admit to it on their website. I think it is possible that your whole foods store might carry some actual yams. I have no reason to disbelieve you.

I'm just saying to folks, in general, to be very suspicious that anything labeled a yam is really a sweet potato. :)

plllog: I don't think howmanykitties was questioning you but just agreeing with everyone that what one normally (but newer multi-culture stores make the 99.99% sweet potato/yam ratio incorrect by a couple orders of magnitude) sees is not a real yam. Then she told a story of someone (of whom there must be many) who believed that those redish sweet potatoes were yams because their parents said so.

I thought everyone called them yams too, but I knew they were sweet potatoes. My parents came from Chicago to CA in ~1920. I had assumed that the red ones were sweeter, but I see that the orange ones grown all over North Carolina are the same. I suppose most of the sweetness comes from the brown sugar and the occasional marshmallow.

I know the difference and have had 'yams'. Never understood the 'yam' labeling in markets. When it is a dark orange sweet potato. Yet i understand that the 'yam' labeled is dark orange and makes no sense. A real yam is bark skinned and often a dryer flesh and white and not at all like our labeled 'yam'.

Not really similar but i find a kinda similar comparison in banana and plantain. Not at all alike but iffy similar. So often at work with SouthAmerican snack caterers but so different in prep and taste. (i don't care much for plantains).

In any form prepared, for some reason unexplained. Probably the fried oily and often 'junk foodiness' of them.

True yam seems a bit like kasava root or other fibious roots much drier than our soft flesh sweet potatoes..because they are not the same.: )

Probably the fried oily and often 'junk foodiness' of them.

Ah, but green ones make splendid pancakes, and if you live in a climate less humid than mine, also crackers and such. Wheat aggravates my asthma and I would rather give up bananas than platanos, although I'm not crazy about tostones or maduros, and I wouldn't eat any commercially grown plantain boiled in the skin.

As a farm kid, they are totally different. Sweet Potatoes are much better. Also IMO I would not suggest Sweet Tater pie over Pumpkin.

I really like sweet potato pie. I made my first one about 6 years ago, as an experiment, for Thanksgiving. I failed to mention that it was sweet potato, not pumpkin. Everyone loved it. They thought it was the best pumpkin pie ever! Then, I remembered to tell them it was sweet potato pie. They said they had thought it tasted a little different, but couldn't quite figure out exactly why until I told them it was sweet potato. They've requested it every year since then. I read a tip online that said to bake the sweet potatoes instead of boiling. So, I have always baked the sweet potatoes until they are very soft and the natural sugars start to caramelize.

I agree baking is the best way for the caramelizing and baking fresh pumpkin does the same. But the variety of pumpkin is key...even the variety of sweet potato. Called a 'yam', lol.

I've never made a pumpkin pie from fresh pumpkin. I yam going to try it. ;) ;)

Just a warning--I tried a pie made with fresh pumpkin last year and had to throw it out, because I falsely assumed I could follow the same recipe I used with canned pumpkin. The roasted fresh pumpkin made a sickly pale pie when combined with the other ingredients in the same proportions, even though I had the same volume of pumpkin. The canned stuff is a lot denser, so take that into account in your baking, or else prepare the pumpkin the traditional way by slow boiling it down for hours.

These Thanksgiving posts bring up memories of successes and failures. A few years ago i had a massive winter squash harvest. Not so much the past two. That year i used two home grown and what i did i thought was perfection, and others agreed...then had failure the next year with a grainy and watery pie. I'm guessing the variety. Then added a roasted sweet potato last year and was really good combined with a roasted pumpkin. (i'm much too wing-it in the baking category.)

Back to the organic canned pumpkin i stock. I always have a few emergency organic cans for pup digestion issues and rarely needed. Making a fail safe small canned pumpkin pie this year. No drama or guessing. We like two small pies...pumpkin and chocolate bourbon pecan. Going back to recipes i've made for years. Safe and good. And then i'll do a new-to-me trial cranberry lemon tart because i just can't help myself when i see something new...

I think butternut squash makes a better pie than pumpkin. Just my thought on it.

Sue

Howmanykitties, I beg your pardon. Yes, it doesn't surprise me that Whole Foods, like any market, might label the kind of sweet potato that have been called "yams" for centuries as "yams" as well. I'm happy to be informed when I'm wrong, and thank those who correct me, but because of past dealings with trolls I get wound up too easily in this kind of situation. My apologies. Chas, thanks for the insight as well. (BTW, what's the answer? How many kitties?)

Will you please post your recipe for baked sweet potato pie?

Writersblock, will you please send the tostones my way? I don't care if they're greasy junk food!!!

Marilyn, I totally agree with you. Just about any of the orange flesh winter squashes are a better choice for 'pumpkin' pie. Seems like there is just more substance to the filling and a creamier texture.

Satsumaimo (or Satsuma Imo)

I think these Japanese sweet potatoes are very similar to regular sweet potatoes, but perhaps not as sweet. I'll photograph it again after I cut it and fry it. I think it will be white inside, or maybe pale yellow. I've had them in tempura before and liked them, and this is really the only way I like sweet potatoes, except in pies.

Pretty! Is it really magenta? Or is that a trick of the light and the board? The scuffed bits look regular sweet potato yellow-orange. Are they from something else? Or the light again?

At Trader Joe's today, I saw bags of small purple skinned sweet potatoes. There was only a little dent in one that I could see, not a proper scuff, but it looked that same golden sweet potato color. Is there a bit of that on the outside, and then the white or purple in the middle? The purple fleshed ones I made that once, best as I can remember, had a brown skin.

They had some sweet potatoes that looked like nothing different or special that were labelled "yams" with no disclaimer. Not a true yam in sight (nor would I expect one at Trader Joe's, though I saw they had parsnips last week, which I've never seen there before).

I think the reason some people call the fat sweet potatoes, not the garnet variety, yams is because the African slaves living in the new world were reminded of something they remembered from Africa that they called "yams", and somehow the name stuck. My new England grandmother loved "yams"...much nicer than sweet potatoes, she said. And I have a friend, an uninformed one, who, when served a yellow potato-like vegetable asks if it's a sweet potato or a yam. Because she says, yams have no nutrition at all and there is no point in eating them. I served her a short fat sweet potato once and she wouldn't eat it because she said it was a yam and not good for you.
Go figure!!

Pllog, when I purchased purple sweet potatoes at Trader Joe's, they had purple skin and white flesh. I seem to remember that they had the actual name of the variety on the package so if anyone is curious, they can look it up online (I think it was murasaki).

Plllog, yes, it is really magenta. You can look for satsumaimo images and find photos that are even more magenta than mine! I think the scuffed parts have oxidized a bit and so the inside might be quite lighter when I cut it open.

Yes, Linda, that's exactly right about why some North American tubers are called yams, but the exact varieties is a later merchant thing where someone decided to differentiate the word from "sweet potato" and it stuck. That's also why so many people use them interchangeably, because in American usage (that is, the way people say it, rather than the way people think people should say it) they really are synonyms however much the FDA, or whoever makes the signage rules, wants to change it. English allows for many homophones and we seem to muddle through. :) Usually we just throw a modifier at it, like "African yams", if there isn't a regulatory body swatting people into compliance. :)

Thanks, Tishtosh and Lars for the information!

No, in "American usage" they are NOT the same.....and this is what this whole thread has been about. Yams are not sweet potatoes.....and Americans call them different things....even though what many call yams are really sweet potatoes.
In my grandmother's eyes and many of my friends eyes yams and sweet potatoes are very different while in reality they are all simply different cultivars of ipomea.

Yes, in American usage, the way people really talk rather than the definitions in books, people use the words interchangeably. They do. People in this thread have said so. And in some American usage, they're different things, like your grandmother's. And in some, like for those of us who regularly see actual yams, they're very different things entirely. But if you poll the whole of non-foodie America, you'll find a large percentage who say they're the same thing. And others who say yams come in canned yams and sweet potatoes come raw from the store. And others who didn't know they weren't just potatoes.

I was at Whole Foods today. Lots of different kinds of potatoes, including one I'd never seen before, but I only saw garnet and pale sweet potatoes, both labeled "sweet potato" and not a yam in sight.

Yesterday, every store where I saw sweet potatoes displayed, garnets and jewels were signed/labeled "yams" and the lighter ones "sweet potatoes."

So I did a quick Google search, and it seemed like the recipes, if they said, called for garnets, so maybe the signs meant these are the ones for the Candied Yams?

We all thought they were the same thing at some point in our cooking careers.

Unless your mother or grandmother sat you down to explain the facts of life, you have to learn this tidbit on the streets.

But whatever you call them, whatever you use, enjoy.

Happy Thanksgiving.

When we would grow our own, I found that the white sweet potatoes do not store well, so never grew them again. We never ever called either of them yams. However, growing up, my Grandma and Mother both called green sweet peppers, mangoes and many old recipe books also called them that. So when you know the difference you call them by their right name.

Happy Thanksgiving,

Sue

Sweet potato greens are delicious. Expensive in an Asian store.

dcarch

Stopped in a few markets while wandering in 'Da'Bronx yesterday. All had yams, white and yellow flesh...and many more roots i've not tried...yet : )

Over the upcoming holidays i'm planning a crazy root roasting tasting menu...(side dish)

Well the one on the left is Taro, and the one on the right is sweet potatoes, even though they are calling them yams. But the one in the middle looks like it could actually be yams!

Oh good F-ing charlie ......it is yam...it is yam. I know the right is a sweet potato. Clearly...I know a true yam and not rare in nyc.It is in every market here. And so many other roots...

Believe what you want...

It's an amazing assortment to choose from! There are probably similar stores in more ethnically diverse parts of Seattle, but my town is too small. Maybe some of the Asian markets here have a selection, but I doubt that many choices.

And here all these years I thought if it was fat and rounded at the ends it was a sweet potato and if it was long and skinny and pointy at the ends it was a yam. I never could taste any difference, so that should have clued me in.