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Taste By Greg Atkinson
Who Needs Pumpkin?For flavor, color and your health, snare some sweet potatoes instead
OK, no one ever carved a carriage out of a sweet potato, and no one ever called a television special "It's the Great Sweet Potato, Charlie Brown." No one chanted a nursery rhyme that goes "Peter, Peter sweet potato eater," either, but perhaps they should. Pumpkins are all well and good, but if you ask this seasonal cook what's hot for fall, I'd say get yourself some sweet potatoes. And I'm not the only one. Sweet potatoes have been popular in the South for generations, but in recent decades cooks in other regions have been succumbing to the charms of this healthy and flavorful distant cousin of garden-variety spuds. RECIPEBotanically speaking, sweet potatoes are a tuber, but in American kitchens, sweet potatoes are more likely to stand in for pumpkin than they are for potatoes. Cooked, sweet potatoes look and behave more like squash than potatoes. On the Gulf Coast and in other parts of the Deep South, they are often used instead of pumpkin to make a pie — a pie that's considerably more flavorful, I might add, than the standard-issue pumpkin. Mostly, though, they are eaten simply baked, split open and topped with butter, and they're called not sweet potatoes but yams. How to fry at home • Make sure the oil is thoroughly preheated before adding food. Use a thermometer or drop a cube of bread into the oil; it should float to the surface and begin bubbling madly almost at once, and be golden brown in a minute. • Use a large, heavy cast-iron or enameled cast-iron stockpot or Dutch oven. The heavy pot will hold the heat when cold food is added to the oil; light-weight pans give up heat easily. • Fry in very small batches. Try to maintain at least three times as much hot oil as food. Remember, crowding is the enemy of crispness. It was a marketing ploy launched in the 1930s, promoting dark orange and "red"-fleshed sweet potatoes as yams. But true yams are actually an entirely different tuber, native to Asia and almost never seen in North America. The vegetables labeled yams in your local market are in fact orange- or red-fleshed sweet potatoes, and the vegetables labeled sweet potatoes are simply paler versions of the same thing. Whatever they are called, sweet potatoes are rich in beta carotenes, the precursor to Vitamin A pigment that renders them orange. According to the North Carolina Sweet Potato Commission, one cup of cooked orange sweet potatoes provides as much vitamin A as 23 cups of broccoli. They're also rich in vitamin E, vitamin B6, potassium and iron. They have more fiber than oatmeal, and they're fat free. It's no wonder that in 1992, the Center for Science in the Public Interest rated sweet potatoes "The Healthiest Vegetable Around." Dr. Robert Cordell, a spokesperson for the North Carolina commission, recommends switching from potato chips to sweet potato chips. Presumably, he might also approve of switching from regular French fries to sweet potato fries. After one bite of the sweet potato fries served at Seattle's Palisade restaurant, I would. Greg Atkinson is author of "West Coast Cooking." He can be reached at greg@northwestessentials.com. Barry Wong is a Seattle-based freelance photographer. He can be reached at studio@barrywongphoto.com.
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