Potatoes Are Sweeter Than Ever at This Japanese Dessert Shop

If you like sweet potatoes from America, you’re going to love sweet potatoes from Japan. Japanese sweet potatoes tend to have a high starch content, making them significantly fluffier than the sometimes stringy American varieties — both the bright purple Okinawa and the tinier, yellow-colored Satsuma potatoes are dense and delightfully creamy (with or without a knob of butter). 

All over Japan, there are shops devoted to the tuber, with sweet potatoes served grilled, whole-roasted, caramelized, or blended into ice cream, but this style of snack has been nearly impossible to find stateside…until now.

Last October, Hello, Yam! opened in the East Village neighborhood of New York City, and the tiny menu acts as an ode to Japanese sweet potatoes. Aside from the drinks — a black sesame latte, hojicha latte, matcha latte, and fuji apple juice — every item the shop serves is made from imported Japanese Beni Haruka sweet potatoes. 

According to WAMI Japan, Beni Haruka is the sweetest potato variety in the world, with a sugar content of 40% when raw and 50-60% when roasted. Still, the flavor (skin and all) is remarkably balanced, with a concentrated nuttiness that makes for a delicious, complex dessert.

Hello, Yam! Serves its Beni Haruka in two forms. The first is “Satsumaimo” or baked — roasted whole until the inside is soft and spoonable and the skin is caramelized with its own sweet juices. The potato is split open and topped with either butter and a drizzle of honey, a scoop of vanilla ice cream, or a brûléed custard. 

The second is in, what the shop has coined as, “silky paste parfaits.” The layered, ice cream sundae-like desserts start with a base of crunchy corn flakes cereal, followed by baked sweet potato chunks, vanilla ice cream, and whipped cream. It’s all topped with the eponymous silky paste — a blended mixture of sweet potato (dyed purple or left in its natural yellow state), sugar, and cream, that is extruded through a machine similar to a spaghetti press. The result: thin strands of sweet potato piled on top of each other like a mountain. 

This Mont Blanc-style topping is common in Japan, often made with hazelnut cream or matcha instead of sweet potato, to add a playful texture to ice creams and cakes, and it does just that in Hello Yam!’s parfait.

Hello Yam! Is New York City’s first sweet potato dessert shop, and it’s so exciting, it makes us wonder, why aren’t we adding baked sweet potatoes to every dessert?