Preserve your freshly grown potatoes by learning how to cure sweet potatoes to turn starches into tasty sugars. Use the following recipes to really make them shine.
Yes, sweet potatoes must be cured after they’re harvested to live up to their name. They come out of the ground starchy and bland. Curing will turn their starches into sugar.
First, set up a warm, humid curing site. The goal is 80 to 85 degrees Fahrenheit with 80 percent to 90 percent humidity for four days to two weeks. The closer you come to these ideal conditions, the less time it’ll take to do the job.
Experiment to find the right site. A covered porch or a little garden greenhouse could work, if you’re able to keep heat and humidity levels in the right ranges and keep potatoes out of direct sunlight. Or, set up a pantry or empty closet with a small heater, a fan, a humidifier or a bucket of warm water, and a thermostat to gauge temperature and humidity. Place potatoes in a single layer on a screen or in crates. If you’re stacking crates, make sure there’s plenty of airflow.
Harvest a few plants to test the cure before digging the whole crop. If it’s too hot or humid, you could induce rot. We set up a small space without airflow at first and accidentally rotted the top tubers. Testing other settings, we found that our high tunnel provides the perfect conditions. We were grateful for an easy setup, since our farm produces thousands of pounds of sweet potatoes. It might take some trial and error to set up your site, but then you’ll be all set for future harvests.
The curing process will heal where the potato snapped from the root, as well as any dings or cuts. If you dig up a gaggle of sweets still attached by roots, snap them apart before curing so the snapped ends will heal. Be gentle when digging them up, but don’t discard the big ones that snapped in half during harvest; the exposed ends will heal during the cure. Healing all those exposures will help prevent rot during storage, a great benefit to curing. Store them unwashed for the longest keep.
Sample a sweet potato before and after curing: Bake a cured one and an uncured one at 350 degrees for 45 minutes or until soft, and taste the difference.
Sweet Potato Recipes
Baked Sweet Potatoes. Scrub sweet potatoes and spike a couple holes in them with a knife. Bake at 350 degrees until soft through the middle. Add butter. Eat the skins too, they are very nutritious!
Sweet Potato Fries. Slice sweet potatoes into French fry strips, toss in a bowl with spices and just a little olive oil (just to coat), bake on a cookie sheet at 410 degrees for about 40 minutes.
Ilene White Freedman operates House in the Woods organic CSA farm with her husband, Phil, in Frederick, Maryland. The Freedmans are one of six 2013 Mother Earth News Homesteaders of the Year.
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