NEVER Cook Your Candied Yams in Water Again — Try This Old FARM Trick

Find All my recipes in one place! Otis Granger Cook Book: https://otisgranger.com/ There's a pot of sweet potatoes boiling on a stove somewhere right now. They'll go in a dish with butter, sugar and marshmallows, and come out pale and falling apart in a thin, watery syrup. It isn't your fault. Every holiday recipe card since 1950 says boil them first. In the china cabinet of almost every farmhouse I clear there's an oval baking dish with an orange-stained bottom. The family always says the same thing: that was the yam dish. I'm Otis. Forty years of barns and estate auctions across the Midwest, and the kitchen is the last room I clear. My mother's candied sweet potatoes came out of the cast iron skillet — deep orange, holding their shape, dark as caramel at the edges — and she never put one in a pot of water. In this one: 1 — the potato: the dark orange ones 2 — the name: why almost nobody in America has ever eaten a real yam 3 — the water: what boiling does to a sweet potato 4 — the clock: why slow heat makes them sweeter 5 — the slice: thick rounds, cut after they're cooked 6 — the syrup: butter, brown sugar, orange, salt, no water 7 — the skillet: low, spooned, turned once 8 — what she did the day before, which I've never once seen in a modern kitchen Bake them whole in their skins, low and slow, and cool them overnight. Slip the skins off, slice them thick, and candy them in the skillet. That's the farm trick. Honest, said plainly in the video: the marshmallow topping came from a marshmallow company's recipe booklet in 1917 — keep it if you love it. This is sweet, and sugar goes from caramel to burnt fast, so watch the end. Did your family call them sweet potatoes or yams — and were there marshmallows on top? Tell me who made them, and tell me her name. I read every one.