Bake Yams
Several Great Ways To Bake Yams
If you're interested in knowing the various ways to bake yams, you'll find recipes either in cook books or by searching the web. There are not a tremendous amount of such recipes available, only because yams are a relative newcomer to the American table. What you definitely will find, are many recipes for cooking and baking sweet potatoes. There is some confusion here, as true yams and sweet potatoes are not one in the same thing, but are totally unrelated vegetables. There is one type of sweet potato, having moist, yellowish meat, and sweeter than the ordinary sweet potato, which is mistakenly called a yam, and is what we normally purchase in the stores as a yam. The true yam can be much more difficult to prepare, and many varieties are toxic until cooked. We'll be working with the more familiar sweet potato version of the yam in this article.
The good new is, most any recipe you'll come across on how to bake sweet potatoes, you can use to bake yams. Since, as we have said, yams tend to be a little sweeter and contain a little more moisture than do the regular sweet potatoes, there may be instances you'll need to take that into account, if you're using a sweet potato recipe. The differences are not all that pronounced however, and if you're going to bake yams, you probably won't have to make any recipe changes.
The basic way to bake yams is to preheat an oven to 425 degrees F, wrap each yam in foil, and bake until tender, about 45 minutes to an hour on the average. Before placing the yams in the foil, it's best to cut a little off of one end of the yam, or puncture the yam after it's been in the oven for 25 to 30 minutes, as a precaution against bursting. Using a baking sheet is best, and you can test for tenderness with a sharp knife when you think they should be about done. When you take the yams out of the oven, you may want to peel them. This will generally be simple to do, but as they are very hot, using a fork or knife instead of your fingers might work best. The yams can be served with butter and seasoning, whole, sliced, or mashed.
A time-saving option would be to precook the yams in the microwave. If you give them about 10 minutes, they'll be half done, after which time you can put them in the oven for another 20 to 25 minutes. The taste will be the same as if you had baked them only in the oven. Still another way to bake yams is to slice them first, brush with olive oil, and bake. You can also cube the yams, garnish with chopped garlic and pepper, place on a baking sheet and bake at around 375 degrees F. Poke the cubes after 30 to 40 minutes to see if they're done. Now you know that to bake yams isn't really an art form, but there are at least a couple of ways you can go about jazzing the dish up a bit.