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Sweet potatoes and yams are both tuber vegetables, but they're actually quite different. This article explains the key differences between sweet potatoes and yams.
With rare exceptions, every orange-fleshed tuber you see or taste in the U.S. — even those sold as candied yams — is a sweet potato. Yams and sweet potatoes aren't even botanical kin. Here's what makes these two so distinct.
Compared to the yam, they have less calories, more vitamin C and significantly more vitamin A. There are two main types of sweet potatoes: firm and soft. Firm sweet potatoes have paler golden skins and dry, flaky flesh, like many types of baking potatoes.
Yams and sweet potatoes are different vegetables from different plants. It's not necessarily wrong to refer to sweet potatoes as yams (because the name has become normalized through the rough history of use), but it is important to understand that the two tubers diverge in look and taste.
Yams have rough, brown, scaly skin, either white or purple flesh and a more starchy and dry texture compared to sweet potatoes. Not are they as sweet. Their texture and flavor are more similar to...
Unlike sweet potatoes, most yams are starchy and not very sweet—if anything they taste more like potatoes or yuca (also know as cassava or manioc) than sweet potatoes. They have a more cylindrical shape with rough, scaly skin that's brown and almost tree-bark-like in appearance.
Drier and less creamy than sweet potatoes, yams are hardly sweet. They have more of an earthy, neutral taste. In fact, a yam's flesh, in both texture and flavor, is more similar to a russet potato than a sweet potato.