
Also called zoete aardappelen, bataat.
In the Netherlands, sweet potatoes are in season October to December, at their best in October. After the harvest, Dutch stores carry them until February. Sweet potatoes are in season now, in November.
Sweet potatoes are a warm-climate crop, but a small number of Dutch growers in Limburg, Brabant and Flevoland have grown them since about 2016. The tubers are lifted in September and October before the first frost, cured, and sold from store into the winter. Nearly all sweet potatoes in the shops are still imported.
Dutch sweet potatoes come to market in autumn and are usually smaller and more irregular than the imports. A farm shop that grows them will say so.
Beta-carotene in large amounts in the orange kinds, plus fibre, potassium, vitamin C and vitamin B6.
To get the most: Cook with a little fat and keep the skin on: the beta-carotene is fat-soluble and much of the fibre is in the skin.
On our nutrient density chart, a normal serving of baked sweet potato (150 g) gives 2 times a day's vitamin A and about a third of a day's vitamin C, counting what your body absorbs. That puts it in the top 25% of the 244 foods we scored.
Content per NEVO, the Dutch food composition database. This describes what the food contains, not what it does for you.
Roast in wedges with the skin on, or bake whole. They keep for weeks somewhere cool but not cold; the fridge spoils them.
Eat the skin. The leaves are edible too, cooked like spinach, if a grower sells the plants.
2 producers in The Field Guide sell sweet potatoes, according to their own website or shop list, each checked against our inclusion criteria and listed by province. Another 176 growers passed our bar for this food group; we have not yet recorded what each of them grows, so ask them or search the map.
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