The Reason You Should Pay Close Attention To Sweet Potato Skin When Shopping

Food waste is a significant problem in America. It's estimated that we throw away 119 billion pounds of perfectly edible food per year, either from uneaten and typically highly perishable food going bad at home, crops spoiling in fields, or food that would be perfectly fine except it looks a little funny, so grocery stores either don't stock it or can't sell it. Given the enormity of this issue, you would think it's important to ignore when food looks a little odd, right?

Well, it depends. Yes, if an apple is just a funny shape, you should eat it and not be concerned, but that doesn't mean there aren't things to watch out for. In particular, certain products warrant a closer look, and one of them is sweet potatoes. It turns out you really don't want to ever buy sweet potatoes with damaged skin or blemishes because that tends to hide issues further under the surface.

Potatoes are known as one of the hardiest possible crops, tubers that seemingly take forever to go bad; if stored correctly in a cool pantry, they can sometimes last for literally months on end. Despite the name, sweet potatoes are much more sensitive, generally only lasting around 3-5 weeks. And skin cracking or blemishes are the easiest way to spot a sweet potato that's already started to go bad. If you see a sweet potato in the grocery store with these features, it's best to avoid it altogether.

If you're dealing with sweet potatoes at home that have developed blemishes over time, some of them might still be salvageable. Just don't try to eat them whole like a baked potato — scoop out the bruised sections and slice up whatever is left (they are particularly well as fries and, of course, the classic sweet potato pie).

There are other mistakes you might be making with sweet potatoes, too. Sometimes, people forget that you need to wash and scrub them (just like regular potatoes) — after all, this is something that grows in the ground. You might also forget to poke holes in them before you bake them, an oversight that will cause tuber explosions in regular baked potatoes and sweet potatoes.

Most of all, you should never store raw sweet potatoes in the refrigerator. This may seem counterintuitive when the goal is to keep them lasting as long as possible, but when stored in a fridge, the cold changes their cell structure, making them tend to firm up in the center and taste funny. Instead, just keep them in a cool, dry place. The same isn't true if you've cooked them, though: At that point, you want to keep them in the fridge.