Source: NCDA&CS, 12/13/19


Sweet potatoes experience a bit of a zenith during the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays when their popularity soars. Sweet potato pies and casseroles are pretty popular, and lots of folks also enjoy what many people may call “candied yams.” In case you missed the memo, those are almost certainly sweet potatoes, not actually yams. (more info here:  https://ncsweetpotatoes.com/sweet-potatoes-101/difference-between-yam-and-sweet-potato/ )

North Carolina is the country’s top producer of sweet potatoes with more than 50% of the country’s crop being grown in the
state. The normal planting and harvesting season means sweet potatoes are readily available in time for Thanksgiving and Christmas, but with proper curing and storage they’re also available year round.

“We’re able to sell year round without a reduction in quality of the product,” said Heather Barnes, a NCDA&CS
marketing specialist. Heather knows a lot about sweet potatoes, not only because of her job but because her family grows sweet potatoes outside Wilson.

She has a computer full of pictures related to sweet potatoes, plus a poster in her office that’s titled “A Year in the Life of a N.C. Sweet Potato.”

“We eat them year round, not just on holidays,” she said. “They’re so versatile.”

Heather has lots of ideas about how to cook sweet potatoes, and she says she often uses sweet potatoes as an ingredient in dishes when she’s cooking for her family.

“It’s not like we’re giving [my children] a baked sweet potato every night,” she said.

“I’m getting ready to make sweet potato, chocolate chip mini muffins. They’re so good!”

She even has recipes for cocktails with sweet potatoes.

Field to Fork
Heather even co-wrote a children’s book about how sweet potatoes get from the farm to the plate. It’s even a pretty good read for
anyone interested in the basics of the process. Fortunately, there’s aren’t a lot of complicated steps, and generally the fewer steps from field to fork, the better.

Farmers don’t plant sweet potato seeds. Instead they get transplants (often called “slips”) from growers that
specialize in sprouting transplants. Once they’re planted, the transplants grow roots and produce sweet potatoes underground as vines grow above ground. Sweet potatoes are ready to be harvested anywhere from 90 to 120 days after the
transplants go in the ground.

A special plow goes through the field and flips the soil. With the dirt broken up, some sweet potatoes pop to the surface while
others remain mixed in with the loosened dirt. Workers walk through the fields with buckets to pick up the sweet potatoes.

“Literally, a person picks up every potato out of the field,” Heather explained.

The workers usually sort the potatoes by size as they gather them, and what happens next depends on where the potatoes are
headed. Most go into wooden boxes or bins and are taken to a storage facility for curing. The boxes are stacked in the building and kept for about four to seven days at a temperature between 90 and 95 degrees Fahrenheit and around 80
to 90 percent humidity. The curing sweetens the potatoes by converting starch to sugar. After the curing, the storage room is cooled to between 50 and 60 degrees Fahrenheit and humidity stays at around 85 percent.

When cured, sweet potatoes can be stored for months and even more than a year. Each year, as the stored supply of sweet
potatoes from last season is shipped out to be sold and eaten, newly cured sweet potatoes become ready for distribution. Many sweet potatoes are shipped to grocery stores, wholesalers, restaurant suppliers, etc. That where many people find the sweet potatoes that end up on their plates.

Sweet potatoes that are small, slightly nicked or just a little unsightly are sent to processing facilities instead.  Those
sweet potatoes are used for a variety of products such as baby food and sweet potatoes fries.

“There are so many places to use sweet potatoes we really don’t have any waste any more,” Heather said.

Some farmers may not send their sweet potatoes to a curing and storage facility. That may be the case if they’re selling directly
do to customers (e.g., at a farmers market or roadside market). If you’re buying directly from a farmer, it’s okay to ask if the sweet potatoes are uncured or “green” (i.e., harvested from the field recently).

Whether the potatoes are from the previous season/year or whether they’re “green” from this year, they’re perfectly edible either way. An uncured sweet potato just may need to be cooked at a lower temperature for longer to give it the sweetness of cured sweet
potato.

The sweet potatoes should also be kept dirty until ready to use. So dirt on them is a good sign they’ve been properly stored.
Don’t wash sweet potatoes until you’re ready to cook them. The potatoes you find in grocery stores are usually washed because there’s an assumption you’re ready to cook them when you take them home.

If you’ve never tried raw sweet potatoes, that’s an option too. Some people slice them into sticks or rounds and eat them like
carrots or any other raw vegetable.