I've actually only discovered sweet potatoes recently. I've only boiled them so far. I'll wait till winter to try baking. Not big on yams.
We made "Roasted Sweet Potato Coins" from Jessica Seinfeld's "The CAN't Cook Book". We start with skinny potatoes (garnet yams) sliced into "coins". Place on rimmed sheet pan and drizzle with olive oil, and sprinkle mixture of brown sugar, salt and pepper & cumin. Roast in oven for 25 to 30 min at 425 degrees, until potatoes are tender. I have to add that EVERY recipe in this book, that we have tried has been a winner, and I assume each has been tested. I highly recommend this cookbook, which comes in a convenient spiral binding.
I like sweet potatoes. My wife doesn't though, so we seldom have them. Probably, I wouldn't want to have them a lot, anyhow.
The Asian sweet potato is off white or light beige rather than orange, so consider that when you see recipes that are resident from that area. I actually like them much better than orange American sweet potatoes, AKA yams. The flavor is very mildly sweet, but it's flavor much more subtle like a red potato or yellow potato. I am no fan of pumpkin either, but I make a southern sweet potato pie that is great, it involves buttermilk, regular milk or cream, freshly ground nutmeg & cinnamon, but little sugar. I got the recipe in Houston.I make it a couple of times per year. My mother used to burn the hell out of yams and squash. Candied or not, there it was. The rest of the family thought that was great. Edit: I do bake some yams a few times per year for my family, so I've even retried them recently. I find them tolerable but not desirable.
I don't believe I've ever seen a yam. I'll bet none of you have either. I've seen the white sweet potatoes in catalogs but I've only grown the orange variety.
The sweet potatoes I buy at the supermarket are always white, the yams are orange. If it's a prepared or frozen sweet potato, then it's orange. But in the fresh produce section they're always white which I like because then it's almost like a white potato. I never make sweet potatoes as a sweet dish, always savory.
our grocery stores sell both varieties, sweet potatoes are labeled as off white and yams are labeled orange or almost red around here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_potato Confusion reigns over semantics. Garnet yams are almost red, yams are orange, and sweet potatoes are off white or light pink. All three are in my grocery stores every week, but not at all grocery stores in my area.
We have lots of pre cut veggies in different shapes in the produce dept...for convenience. Those are always marked as sweet potatoes and are orange. They even have crinkle cut sweet potato fry shapes. Costs a little more.
If you check out the link that @Sheldon Scott posted, I think that you will find that he is correct, and most of us have never even seen a real yam, let alone tasted one before. What I read was that yams , real yams, grow in Africa, and they can get to be several pounds and maybe a foot or so long. When the first Africans were brought to America, we had sweet potatoes, which tasted similar to the yams that they ate in Africa, so they called them yams. All of the different colors of sweet potatoes are still a sweet potato, and a true yam is never seen or sold here in our grocery stores. Here is a picture of what an actual yam looks like.