You say pa-tay-to, I say pa-tah-to…or I say yuca. Or maybe ñame or taro or edo or any of the many other tuber vegetables there are out there. (Although I would assume that Peruvians — who were the world’s original potato growers — would also say patata since they enjoy over 3,000 varieties of them.) [...]
American cuisine has some instant-hit classics — corn bread, macaroni and cheese, bison burgers — but compared to other cuisines, we really don’t do much with tubers. Potatoes are pretty much the extent of our tuber dabbling. And who doesn’t like potatoes? Stands to reason other tubers would be tasty, too. If you hang around [...]
Have you ever boiled a potato and helplessly watched it fall apart? Or wanted rice to clump together for the sake of eating it with chopsticks and then had to chase individual grains around your plate? Odds are, you picked the wrong type of starch for your dish. In the case of rice, short-grain and [...]
Although grocery shoppers in the United States use “sweet potatoes” and “yams” interchangeably, yams are actually unrelated tropical tubers. They’re paler and more crisp than what we think of as yams/sweet potatoes. You’ll probably stumble across true yams if you’re in a mercado in Latin America, but if you’re State-side, even the canned “yams” are [...]
Continue reading about Sweet Potatoes and Yams: A Case of Mistaken Identity
