It was a long-time mystery for me why roasted sweet potatoes (yakiimo in Japanese) sold at supermarkets in Japan can be so sweet. If you steam or boil them at home, they don’t become so sweet.
Look at this golden, creamy softness!
My friend finally gave me the answer, which disappointed me a lot…
He told me we need to roast it with far-infrared rays to make it sweet and soft, which means we need a special apparatus.
But I didn’t give up. I experimented to find how I can make the roasted sweet potatoes that supermarkets sell with what I already have at home. I will introduce my best way to roast sweet potatoes here.
Health benefit of sweet potatoes
Before going into how to roast sweet potatoes, there are many reasons why we should eat sweet potatoes, for example,
Sweet potatoes
1. prevent us from catching a cold
2. help us recover from fatigue
3. improve our skin condition
It contains vitamin C and dietary fiber. I feel my nose is cleared after I eat sweet potatoes.
Then how can we make super sweet yakiimo?
I learned sweet potatoes become super sweet when it is heated at 70 degrees Celsius. So it is like “warm” rather than “roast.”
I did an experiment. I made yakiimo in 3 ways.
1. Used rice cracker. Pour water up to a half-height of the sweet potatoes, then cooked as usual (Left)
2. Baked a sweet potato wrapped in aluminum foil in an oven toaster at 180 degrees Celsius for 30 minutes (Center)
3. Baked a sweet potato without aluminum foil in an oven toaster at 180 degrees Celsius for 30 minutes (Right)
Guess which one was the sweetest. (Assume all the sweet potatoes had the same sweetness originally.)
The answer is No. 3. No. 1 and 2 were not so sweet. See, No. 3 looks most yellow in the photo. (By the way, the green spots in 3 are parts where chlorogenic acid reacted with alkaline materials. No harm in eating it.)
So here are tips to make sweet yakiimo at home
1. Choose small sweet potatoes as it shortens the time to roast
2. Wash them well and roast with skin
3. Roast in an oven toaster at 180 degrees Celsius for 30 minutes (or more) without aluminum foil
Yakiimo is a good snack when we get a little hungry at 4 pm.
If you eat potato chips as a snack, replace them with roasted sweet potatoes. This should bring you more health benefits.
So, try this easy and healthy snack at 4 pm when you get a bit hungry!
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