A perfect side dish for holidays but easy enough for any weeknight.
Mashed sweet potatoes or garnet yams can always be found on our holiday or Thanksgiving table.
Most often we make a double or triple recipe because everyone wants the leftovers!
Elise Bauer
Simply Recipes / Elise Bauer
My father first came upon this idea in an old issue of Bon Appetit.
We’ve reduced the sugar from the original recipe and added some salt and pepper.
The spices give the yams a wonderfully festive holiday accent!
Simply Recipes / Elise Bauer
Real yams aren’t often found in U.S. supermarkets, but sweet potatoes abound.
Why do we call sweet potatoes yams?
Growers probably chose the name because the two tubers were already confused.
Simply Recipes / Elise Bauer
Yams are an important food in Africa, and slave traders used sweet potatoes as food for their captives.
Enslaved Africans called them yams since they looked similar to the food they knew.
People interchanged the terms for centuries before growers marketed sweet potatoes as yams.
Put the potatoes on a foil-lined roasting pan or thick, rimmed baking sheet.
Bake until the sweet potatoes are completely tender, about 50 minutes to an hour or more.
Remove from oven and let sit until cool enough to touch.
Cut the sweet potatoes lengthwise and scoop out the insides into a large bowl.
Sprinkle with a little ground black pepper to taste.
(But don’t eat them all, even though you will be tempted.)
