Yam Chocolate Chip Bread - A Holiday Treat

Yams are an orange, potato like vegetable that are often served as a holiday main dish either as a vegetable or in place of potatoes. Sprinkling brown sugar and butter over them or pouring honey over them while heating them makes for a nice sweet tasting vegetable - sort of a prelude to desert.

However, this Hub is not about yams as a vegetable dish or as an alternative to potatoes in the main course but rather as a substitute for pumpkin in our pumpkin chocolate chip bread.

Given that canned yams (which have been pre-cooked) are the same color and, when mashed, have about the same consistency as the cooked and strained pumpkin found on store shelves, I have always thought that yams or sweet potatoes could be substituted for the pumpkin in pumpkin bread.

However, I never had any reason to experiment until now. This past Thanksgiving I purchased some canned pumpkin the weekend before Thanksgiving and, a couple of days before Thanksgiving used it to make pumpkin bread.

When my son saw the bread he commented that he had gone to the store on Monday to buy pumpkin to make the bread also and was told that something had destroyed most of the crop and there was no more available.

I didn't give this a thought until my wife and I went shopping to prepare for Christmas dinner and there was no pumpkin available. That was the bad news. The good news was that I could now put my theory about substituting yams or sweet potatoes to the test. Since we happened to have a 29 ounce can of yams in the pantry, yams became the subject of the experiment.

My wife made the bread today using yams and I immediately tried a piece when I came home from work and found that I couldn't tell the difference between the yam chocolate chip bread I was sampling and our traditional pumpkin chocolate chip bread I have been used to.

So here is our new recipe for Yam Chocolate Chip Bread.

7 Cups Flour

5 1/2 Cups Sugar

4 Teaspoons Baking Soda

2 Teaspoons Cinnamon

2 Teaspoons Salt

1/4 Teaspoon Nutmeg

8 Eggs

4 Cups of yams cooked and mashed*

2 Cups Cooking Oil

1 1/3 Cups Water

2 Teaspoons Vanilla

2 Cups Chocolate Chips

*Can use a 29 oz can of cooked yams or you can bake or boil fresh yams and then mash them as you would potatoes, using either a fork, potato masher or electric blender. A standard size large can of pre-cooked yams is 29 oz and this will make about 4 - 5 loaves of bread.

Turn Oven on and let it pre heat to 350 degrees while you are mixing the ingredients.

Using a fork, potato masher or electric blender, mash or blend yams until they are smooth and can be mixed with the other ingredients. Set aside and proceed to next step below.

Sift (or mix if you do not have a sifter) together flour, sugar, baking soda, cinnamon, nutmeg and salt. Make sure these are all mixed together well.

Make a hole in the middle and add eggs, mashed/blended yams, cooking oil and water. Mix well with a spoon or electric mixer until batter is smooth.

OPTIONAL: For a somewhat lighter and fluffier bread, beat an extra two or three minutes. This will add more air to the mixture causing it to be lighter and fluffier (this will also expand the mixture somewhat, as the air will add volume to it, giving you enough batter to make an additional 1 to 2 1/2 loaves without adding additional ingredients).

Add vanilla and chocolate chips (note: standard bag is slightly more than 2 cups so you can either pour the whole bag into the mix or measure it and eat the remainder as a reward for your efforts.)

Grease bread loaf pans (we use 8 1/2 x 5 x 2 1/2 inch glass loaf pans but I have used aluminum loaf pans of the same size in the past as well - using different size loaf pans than these will result in more or fewer loaves than the 2 - 3 or the 3 - 4 1/2 that result from beating the mixture longer) or muffin pans (if you want to make individual muffins rather than loaves) and pour the mix into the pans. Fill the pans about 3/4 full with batter.

Bake for about 1 hour or until a knife inserted into the middle of the loaf comes out clean.

Let each pan cool for 5 minutes and then holding the pan with a pot holder, shake lightly until bread separates from sides and bottom of pan.

Turn pan over and drop bread on a cooling rack to cool.

If you do not intend to eat all the loaves right away you can wrap the individual loaves well in aluminum foil and store them in freezer until needed.

Like pumpkins, yams are rich beta carotene, an essential nutrient for good health. While this bread is not as good a source of beta carotene as a regular serving of yams as a vegetable, it is a delicious way to get some beta carotene into your diet.

For this recipe my wife reduced the sugar from the 6 cups used in our regular pumpkin bread to 5 1/2 cups as yams tend to be somewhat sweater than pumpkin and the yams we used were packed in a light syrup. You can reduce the sugar some more or reduce the amount of chocolate chips if you want it less sweet or reduce the calories.