Once reserved for holiday meals, sweet potato has ventured farther afield, as consumers have embraced it in recent years as a supposedly more nutritious, tastier alternative to regular potatoes. Now food marketers are embracing the trend, adding it to a variety of products, many of which don’t traditionally contain any sort of potato.
The number of sweet potato-containing product launches world-wide increased 27% last year to more than 2,000—a near-doubling from 2014. Driving the trend is the idea that sweet potato turned into multiple different products, in much the same way cauliflower has in recent years. Restaurants are jumping on the bandwagon too: Sweet potatoes are now found on many of their menus.
The new products build on an increasing appetite for sweet potatoes. U.S. farmers harvested nearly 173,000 acres of sweet potatoes in 2017, up 38% from 2012. “I’ve never seen a crop take off like sweet potato has,” says one horticulture professor at North Carolina State University who specializes in sweet potato and potato breeding.
At a time when people are embracing gluten-free diets and cutting carbs, sweet potato offers a couple of advantages. It’s gluten-free, unlike other carbohydrate sources like bread. And while it is high in carbohydrates, it releases sugar into the bloodstream more evenly, helping people feel fuller longer. Sweet potatoes are particularly rich in vitamin A and carry antioxidants.
In other ways, though, sweet potatoes are not that different from white potatoes: Boiled, skinless sweet potatoes have slightly fewer carbs—17 grams per 100 gram serving, compared with white potatoes at 20 grams. They also have slightly fewer calories—76 per serving for sweet potatoes compared with 85 for white potatoes. But the nutritional difference is modest.
As for vegetables labeled yams, for the most part in the U.S., those are actually just a variety of sweet potato. True yams are from a different plant group, with a drier and starchier flesh.
Using sweet potato can require some trial and error. Before it launched pizzas with a sweet potato crust, one company’s employees spent six months on research-and-development. The goal was to make sweet potato a front-and-center ingredient. The 9-inch frozen pizzas, which say “made with sweet potato crust” in capital letters, now come in two varieties: chicken-flavored barbecue and four-cheese.
Even cauliflower entrepreneurs are getting into the game. One found a manufacturing processor who could slice and package bread made with sweet potatoes. They market it as a bread replacement, calling it “the best thing since sliced bread.” The product launched a year ago has now gone nationwide.
Although some claim you can’t mess up a sweet potato, others are starting to rebel. One consumer says he is tired of friends and family using sweet potatoes in place of white potatoes, particularly in his favorite Indian dishes. He says, “It’s like sabotage.”
Interestingly, although the sweet potato is not closely related botanically to the common potato, they have a shared etymology. The first Europeans to taste sweet potatoes were members of Christopher Columbus’s expedition in 1492. Later explorers found many cultivated plants under an assortment of local names, but the name which stuck was the indigenous name of batata. The Spanish combined this with another word for potato, papa, to create the word patata for the common potato.
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May 24, 2020 at 08:02AM
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Let's Reminisce: Sweet potatoes galore - North Texas e-News
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