What Type Of Sweet Potatoes Are Used In The Sweet Potato Macaroni Cheese?

Our answer

Nigella's Sweet Potato Macaroni Cheese (from SIMPLY NIGELLA) adds mashed sweet potatoes to a macaroni and cheese sauce mixture and spikes it with salty feta to balance out the sweetness.

Unfortunately there is quite a lot of confusion between the terms "sweet potato" and "yam". A sweet potato is a tuber and can be yellow or orange. In the 1930s there was an American marketing campaign to promote a new variety of orange-fleshed sweet potatoes and they were labelled as yams, but they are tubers and part of the sweet potato family. And this is the type used in the recipe - they may be sold as as yams in parts of the US but they are actually sweet potatoes and labelled as sweet potatoes in the rest of the world. The yellow-fleshed variey of sweet potato (sometimes called white sweet potatoes) tend to be drier and less sweet than the orange variety, so we would prefer not to use them in this recipe. There are also purple sweet potatoes, but we would also avoid them for this recipe as they are likely to turn the sauce a slightly unappetising colour.