Baked Sweet Potato Nutrition Facts and Calories

The orange "yams" in most US supermarkets are sweet potatoes. True yams are the starchy tubers of a different plant family, grown mainly in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, with rough, bark-like skin and white or purple flesh that is not sweet. Sweet potatoes belong to the morning glory family. The name "yam" stuck to soft, orange sweet potatoes in the United States, and USDA requires produce labeled "yam" to also carry the term "sweet potato."

The orange color comes from beta-carotene, which the body converts to vitamin A. That is why the vitamin A figure on this page, given as retinol activity equivalents (RAE), is so high for an orange-fleshed sweet potato.

• Orange-fleshed: the common US type, moist and sweet when baked. USDA's record reflects this kind.
• Japanese (white or pale yellow flesh): reddish-purple skin and drier, starchier flesh with a chestnut-like taste. Pale flesh means far less beta-carotene, so far less vitamin A than the figures here.
• Purple-fleshed: colored by anthocyanins, the same pigments found in blueberries, rather than beta-carotene, so they also have much less vitamin A than orange sweet potatoes.

The vitamin A level in USDA's record reflects orange flesh, so if you cook or sell a pale or purple variety, treat the vitamin A figures here as not applying to it.

Baking drives water out of a sweet potato, so baked flesh has a little more of everything per gram than raw. Slow baking also lets the potato's own enzymes break some starch into maltose, which is why a baked sweet potato tastes sweeter and USDA's baked record lists more sugar per 100 g than its raw record. Boiled, peeled sweet potato picks up some water and has slightly fewer calories per gram than baked.

The record here excludes the skin. The skin is edible once scrubbed, and eating it adds a little weight and fiber that these numbers do not count.

• Sweet potato casserole. Mashed sweet potato with butter and brown sugar, topped with marshmallows or a pecan crumble. The toppings add most of the sugar. Butter · Brown Sugar · Marshmallows
• Sweet potato pie. A custard pie of mashed sweet potato, eggs, milk and sugar in a flour crust. Egg · Whole Milk · Sugar · All-Purpose Flour
• Sweet potato fries. Wedges or sticks roasted or fried in oil. Frying adds fat the plain potato does not have. Olive Oil
• Black bean and sweet potato chili or tacos. Roasted sweet potato cubes with black beans, onion and tomato. Black Beans · Onion · Tomato
• Mashed sweet potatoes. Mashed with butter and sometimes a little honey or cinnamon. Butter · Honey

Store raw sweet potatoes somewhere cool, dry and dark, such as a pantry, rather than in the refrigerator. Cold storage can cause chilling injury: a hard center that will not soften when cooked, and an off flavor. Once cooked, sweet potatoes do belong in the refrigerator, and mashed sweet potato freezes well.

This record is for cooked flesh, so it fits recipes where you weigh sweet potato after baking and peeling. If your recipe starts from raw sweet potato that then cooks inside the product, as in a pie or a baked bar, weigh the raw peeled potato and account for the water lost in baking by setting the final batch weight in the recipe nutrition calculator or the label generator. Toppings such as sugar, butter and marshmallows usually change the label more than the potato does. The FDA reference amount for your product type is in the RACC lookup.