Curing The Crop

Once the harvest is over, we begin sorting out the sweet potatoes.  Unlike the ones you find in the produce section of your store, there is a wide variety of sizes of sweet potatoes you unearth from the garden.  We like to sort them out and grade them into several categories.  We lay out buckets for the sorting job and then get after it.  We'll take all the HUGE sweet potatoes and put them in one container.  These big ones run the risk of being too stringy or woody to eat.  If we find this is the case, they become chicken feed.

The easiest to sort are the sweet potatoes that are really too small for human consumption.  Or maybe those that got cut in half during harvest.  These go into the bin that will be used as feed for our cattle.  Cows love the sweet potato vines and leaves, and they also love the crunchy sweetness of these.  We will toss a few in their feed buckets and they enjoy them.

The next sort are those that are too big for cattle feed, but are too small for baking.  We'll generally use these for making latkes or oven baked sweet potato fries.

The next sort are those that are pretty much perfect in size.  These will be baked and cut open so that pats of butter can be inserted into the steaming interior.  Delish!

Fortunately, we have a lot of sweet potatoes that are this size.

But it is not wise to bring them in to eat just yet.  First you must cure the sweet potatoes to get the maximum flavor out of your harvest.  Curing is done so that changes occur within the sweet potato in which starches are converted to sugar.  It takes four to eight weeks of hanging.  We generally do this in our garage.  We use typical onion sacks to provide air flow.  During this time, cuts from the harvest caused by shovel nicks heal up.

Coincidentally, these sweet potatoes ought to be at their best flavor around Thanksgiving time!

We have a lot to be thankful for this year!