Sweet Potato Leaves Can be Eaten Raw!

posted Today 5:51:56 PM PDT
Sweet potato leaves are edible raw!



A good hot weather green. The vines really put out a lot of leaves fast.

I just stuck Sweet Potatoes half way in the ground in the shade and waited. A critter ate the Garnet Yam (actually all yams that they sell or grow in the US are sweet potatoes - weird, but true) so I tried again, burying the whole thing. Jewel Yams and Garnet Yams and Asian Sweet Potatoes produced leaves fastest for me. The plain old pale Sweet Potato was very slow. I am not going to try that again.

I started them in pots and will transplant. It seemed like the best thing to do since I started this experiment in the heat of August, and doubted that they would be happy rooting in that heat.

I have eaten the leaves raw, and they are definitely OK. A little bland, with a little spicyness. They are a little mucilaginous, but not bad.

I hope this is useful information.

Pamela Melcher

More on eating raw and cooked Sweet Potato leaves:

http://www.livestrong.com/article/489663-nutritional-value-of-sweet-potato-tops/

This source sounds more credible.

I hope this is useful to some.

Pamela Melcher

My wife's mother, who is from Taiwan, mentioned that during WWII & the Japanese occupation there, the locals relied on sweet potatoes to survive.
The Japanese saw it as peasant food and demanded other foods/meat.

The tops were stir-fried. Also tubers would be sliced into thin strips and dried. They could be stored this way for a very long time. Then they would just boil the dried strips into a soup.

In Florida you can buy and grow true yams, but usually in Asian markets and its hard to find the rarer yams. But they are distinct front sweet potatoes, not the same.

Just wanted to clarify that. I was told you can't get yams in the US, but now we are growing them, so clearly not true.

Eric Markov wrote:
My wife's mother, who is from Taiwan, mentioned that during WWII & the Japanese occupation there, the locals relied on sweet potatoes to survive.
The Japanese saw it as peasant food and demanded other foods/meat.

The tops were stir-fried. Also tubers would be sliced into thin strips and dried. They could be stored this way for a very long time. Then they would just boil the dried strips into a soup.

When things got tough in Japan later in the war, they fell back on sweet potato as well. Many asians look down on SP as animal fodder, but plenty of people eat them, too.

Dried sweet potato (hoshi-imo) is still eaten in Japan as a snack food. There was some guy in Ibaraki prefecture doing Fukuoka-inspired Natural Farming and making a killing selling dried SP in Tokyo.

Here in Los Angeles, you can find the leaves & shoots at Farmer's Market, and elsewhere sometimes in Asian Markets - a cheap way to get slips for growing your own SP.

Had SP leaves for lunch today: toasted sesame oil, garlic, SP leaves & shoyu. Yum!