Sweet potatoes offer many advantages: they are healthy, nutritious, versatile in the kitchen and taste great. Under suitable conditions, the tubers can also be kept for several weeks. So you always have the miracle tuber at hand.
Sweet potatoes can be stored in a box in the basement for weeks
Things to know about sweet potatoes
The sweet potato originally comes from Central America, so it likes warmth but is otherwise undemanding. Proven varieties also thrive in our latitudes, such as 'Beauregard' or 'Erato Orange'. They should be grown in a sunny location, ideally next to a heat-retaining south wall.
In many regions of the world, the sweet potato is a staple food. However, the sweet potato is not closely related to the common potato that is widespread in our country.
Save sweet potatoes
Sweet potatoes are slightly more hydrated than regular potatoes, so they don't keep quite as long. But even if you keep it at home, you can achieve a storage period of several weeks.
You should not store sweet potatoes in the refrigerator, as the temperatures there are too low for the heat-loving vegetable. A cool basement room with a temperature of around 15 °C is ideal for storing sweet potatoes. However, if you don't have access to a cellar, you can store the sweet potatoes at room temperature, which will only slightly shorten their shelf life.
Store only perfectly intact sweet potatoes, as injured tubers will rot quickly and the rot can spread to other sweet potatoes. To protect them from bruises during storage and to accommodate their preference for dark storage, you can wrap the sweet potatoes individually in newspaper. The humidity in the storage room should not be too low so that they do not dry out. Regularly check the stored sweet potatoes for mold growth in order to be able to sort out affected tubers immediately so that the mold does not spread to the others.
Freeze the sweet potatoes
To keep sweet potatoes longer than the six weeks possible in the cellar, you can freeze them pre-cooked. You can do this as follows:
- Thoroughly clean the sweet potatoes.
- Cook them with their skins on.
- Let the sweet potatoes cool completely.
- Wrap the cooked bulbs individually in aluminum foil.
- Place the sweet potatoes in freezer bags and place in the *** freezer where they will keep for a year.
Alternatively, you can freeze mashed sweet potatoes. To do this, peel the cooked sweet potatoes, mash them and fill the mash first in ice cube molds, then after a few hours in sealable containers. This allows you to individually portion the sweet potato mash later.
The garden journal freshness ABC
How can fruit and vegetables be stored correctly so that they stay fresh for as long as possible?
The garden journal freshness ABC as a poster:
- as a free PDF file to print out yourself