This allows the bark to be peeled away easily. In spring, the cambium is dividing rapidly and creating new wood, resulting in a soft, slippery layer beneath the bark. The keys to an easy peel are to cut the tree when it is actively growing, which only happens in the spring of the year, and peel it as soon as possible thereafter. Peeling logs can be very easy or very difficult, depending on when and how you go about it. Perhaps you’ve tried peeling a log or two and, after considerable effort, have ended up with a bruised and gouged piece of wood, not at all like the smooth logs pictured in the log home catalogs. Peeling the bark off logs increases the longevity of the wood because bark provides both a home for damaging insects and a place for moisture to collect, which can ultimately lead to rot. As it melts into your potato, all your produce aisle quandaries may melt away too.If you’re building a log cabin or some other sort of log structure, your instructions will likely tell you to peel the logs first. You can make sambal paste with chiles, garlic, ginger, lemongrass, lime zest, and salt, or just mix 1 Tbsp. One of Heck’s favorite ways to eat them is to top them with sambal butter. You could also blend them up into a stunningly hued sweet potato soup. Heck suggests roasting, sautéing, or frying purple sweet potatoes to prevent the color from bleeding out when cooking. The North Carolina-grown Stokes varietal is the most popular (with a sweet chestnut flavor), but you can sometimes find Hawaiian Okinawan potatoes, with purple-speckled flesh, that are best when boiled whole. But don’t confuse them with Peruvian purple potatoes-the vividly colored spuds from South America are savory, not sweet. The term may apply to sweet potatoes with purple skin and creamy white flesh, ones with white skin and deep purple flesh, or varieties in which both the skin and flesh are shades of purple. Purple sweet potatoes have super amped-up anthocyanin like blueberries, which are great for both color and antioxidants. Neutral flavored yams are often boiled or steamed to serve alongside hearty braised meats the cooked flesh may be pounded into fufu or swallow, a starchy paste eaten in many cuisines of the African diaspora. the purple yams popular in Filipino cooking) and can be more rightly compared to the texture and flavor of white russet potatoes, but with more fiber and complex carbs. The most common yams have starchy white flesh (though some reddish, yellow, and purple cultivars exist, such as ube, a.k.a. They have bumpy, tough gray-brown skin (that looks almost like the bark of a tree and must be peeled away with a knife as it’s far too tough for a vegetable peeler). Yams are commonly used in Caribbean and West African cooking and can grow as long and thick as an adult arm. True yams are part of an entirely different genus ( Dioscorea sweet potatoes belong to Ipomoea in the morning glory family) and are more akin to yuca in texture and flavor. Dorling Kindersley/Getty Images So, what are yams? The skin of a yam (left) looks kind of like tree bark, while a sweet potato (right) is smoother with a reddish-brown tinge. The word yam is derived from nyam, nyami, or nyambi, verbs of various African dialects meaning either “to taste” or “to eat.” The prevailing theory is that enslaved Africans applied these terms over time to the sweet potatoes available in the Americas, which took the place in their diet of the staple root vegetable grown in much of West Africa. The reason for the name mix-up, she explains, is because Louisiana sweet potato growers in the 1930s marketed a new breed of orange-fleshed sweet potatoes as “yams” to distinguish their crop from other states’ produce-and it stuck. It’s all a facade! “Most of the so-called yams you see in American grocery stores are actually orange-fleshed sweet potatoes,” explains Mary-Frances Heck, a former BA staffer and the author of Sweet Potatoes. So, what’s the difference between a sweet potato and a yam? At most markets: absolutely nothing. Do you ever find yourself loitering in the produce aisle, internally debating the merits of yams versus sweet potatoes? At many grocery stores, they often look identical, but I’ve found that “yams” can be as low as 79 cents per pound, while “sweet potatoes” cost $2.49 per pound.
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