Japanese Sweet Potato

I love roasted sweet potatoes (yaki-imo). They’re basically potatoes but as a dessert. Like many other tubers, they host a plethora of nutrients and fiber.

When roasted for long enough, they will caramelize and develop flavours. I found this great post from Matcha and Tofu that discusses how to cook them. There’s also post from Just One Cookbook with independent investigation and conclusions.

Roasting

Sweet potatoes should be roasted at 325F (160C) for 1.5 hours.

A lower temperature will limit caramelization and give more attention to the smooth starchy texture. A higher temperature will develop flavours and texture, as there will be more moisture loss.

A long roast time is needed to give time for Maillard reaction and caramelization. This is chemical process and time is one of the element in the equation. Cutting this short will give you a baked potatoes but not develop those flavour notes.

Potatoes can be wrapped in tin foil, which will limit moisture loss. The downside is that it will slow the Maillard/caramelization as it prevents the surface temperature from reaching above 200F. When baked uncovered, the skin will pull away from the flesh as moisture loss and caramelization develops. Consider using tin foil for first 60 minutes, then leaving unwrapped for remainder of the bake.

Unicode

Fun fact, there’s an emoji for this: 🍠. It’s in the first set of emojis that was standardized by the Unicode consortium, for Unicode 6.0 (October 2010). Prior versions of unicode did have emojis but they were mostly a result of appeasing a hodgepodge of Japanese cellular providers.

Japanese cell phone users were using emoticons and cell phone manufacturers were converting these into emojis. However, there was a lack of standardization, making it a living nightmare for anyone who was working in this space.