Bkworm wrote:Just wondering if anyone else has problems finding sweet potatoes during the summer?
I haven't been able to get decent sweet potatoes here in NJ for over a year now. They're all small, mealy, and many just look puckered and dehydrated even as they come out of the storeroom of the grocery stores. And it's not just one store - I've been to every chain grocery store in about a 15 mile radius (and in crowded urban NJ, that's a lot of stores) and many mom & pop produce stores, and they all look this way. Sometimes one of the Asian markets will get in their Japanese sweet potatoes and a few of the orange ones, and they won't look too bad, but still those tiny ones, about the size of a deck of cards.
But no matter where or what size, any sweet potato I bought in any store is pretty much tasteless.
Have looked for frozen sweet potatoes that have been mentioned on this forum but have never found any at the stores we frequent.
One of our local chain grocery stores (Stop and Shop) carries them in the frozen food department near the frozen specialty veggies, like organics, Kosher, and non-major brands, off to the side of the big name and store brand frozen veggies. The brand is Pict Sweet. The year we lived in FL (almost 20 years ago now), that was a big brand on the shelves in Publix, the store we used to shop in. But they're $3.99 a bag for the equivalent of maybe 1 decent sized sweet potato, and even more tasteless than what's in the produce section.
I can get to a Whole Foods Market occasionally but don't like to shop there as it is so expensive. We have a Trader Joe's but the parking is such as issue there I have never even been to ours.
The closest of those stores to me is at least an hour away in normal traffic, longer during rush hours. We have to drive near both the Holland and Lincoln tunnels to get there, and traffic can sometimes be a horror show, so we rarely travel out that way. It's been over a year since we last went. Even at $4.99/lb, their sweet potatoes looked horrible. The times before that when we went I would buy about 3 grocery bags full of assorted sweet potatoes that they had - hang the cost! - because they were a nice size, looked good, and tasted great. They not only had plain old orange ones (that I didn't bother buying there) but the Hannah yams, the white yams, even purple sweet potatoes. I've never seen those locally, except an occasional Hannah yam sent by mistake and my favorite produce guy was surprised I even knew what it was. It had to be a mistake because they would be mixed in with the orange ones.
The first day it opened, they had to have police there to monitor the parking lot, which went on for months.
The WF I mentioned still occasionally needs a cop for traffic duty. The store is about 2 miles from the Washington Bridge and when that traffic backs up it can block all the strip malls along that road.
Is it because we are in Florida that it is so difficult to find good sweet potatoes? Growing up, sweet potatoes were considered a winter crop.
I remember back in 2017 people were already complaining on-line about the difficulty in finding decent sweet potatoes, and they even vanished completely from some areas. Things haven't been the same since, not even the height of sweet potato season - the month of November.