Recent scientific studies reveal one important fact regarding our nutrition: Cruciferous vegetables, dark leafy greens, citrus fruits, berries, and of course, our humble sweet potatoes are the most nutritious foods on the planet Earth. Isn’t it surprising that sweet potatoes are also featured in the list as one of the nutrient-dense foods? A tuber vegetable that we all ignored so far…

Both sweet potato tubers and tender greens are used as nutritious foods. In certain parts of the world, sweet potatoes are used as a staple food also. A detailed account of various food uses of sweet potatoes is given below:

Sweet Potato as a Staple Food: Food & Agriculture Organization of the United Nations suggests that sweet potato may be considered as an important staple food because of its high nutrient value. Sun-dried slices of sweet potato tubers and sun-dried crushed tubers are used as a staple food in many African countries. Earth-baked sweet potato tubers are eaten as a snack. All these foods are normally eaten with peanut sauce.

Sweet Potato Leafy Greens: Sweet potato leaves are edible and can be prepared like spinach or turnip greens. The young leaves and vine tips of sweet potato leaves are widely consumed as a vegetable and as a salad ingredient in many African countries. Young sweet potato leaves are also used as a baby food particularly in Southeast Asian countries.

Culinary Uses: Tubers can be cooked by pressure-cooking, boiling, steaming, roasting, and baking. Sweet potato-based soups can be prepared by boiling sweet potato tubers in water with rock sugar, ginger, and other ingredients.

Thin slices of sweet potato tubers may be used as a pizza topping. Small tubes of tubers are cooked with colocasia/taro tubers, sugar, and coconut milk to make delicious sweet desserts. Thin slices of tubers dipped in batter and deep fried are used as snack foods.

Processed Products of Sweet Potatoes: Sweet potatoes can be processed into a number of edible products. Some of the popular sweet potato products are candied sweet potatoes, sweet potato pickles, sweet potato chips, sweet potato flour, and sweet potato flat breads.

Non-Culinary Uses of Sweet Potatoes: There are many sweet potato cultivars that are bred for ornamental purposes only. These cultivars have exquisite, attractive foliage and are popular as garden, ornamental plants. A few other cultivars are grown exclusively as cattle fodder crops. Some sweet potato cultivars are suitable to grow as aquarium plants.

Some dark coloured cultivars of sweet potato are grown for extracting food colours. Experiments are still going on at different agricultural experiment stations around the world to develop some cultivars exclusively for biofuel production purposes.

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