How Many Sweet Potatoes Are in a Pound?

Sweet potatoes are a fairly common ingredient in a lot of cooking. Have you ever come across a sweet potato recipe that called for a whole pound of fresh sweet potatoes? How do you know how many sweet potatoes are in a pound?

You don't want to end up with a bunch of unused pounds of sweet potatoes on your hands, so here's what we found so you know what to do the next time a recipe calls for sweet potatoes and you don't just have a 1 pound bag of them lying around.

How Many Sweet Potatoes?

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Recipes for everything from side dishes to entrees and more sometimes call for sweet potatoes -- sweet potato casserole, sweet potato fries, sweet mashed potatoes, and sweet potato pie are just a few examples of dishes that can use raw sweet potatoes. These root vegetables are "fat-free, low in sodium, and high in fiber," according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch, and they're a good source of both vitamin A and vitamin C.

But how many should you pick up from the grocery store if you need to know how many sweet potatoes equals a pound? According to that outlet, for cooking, "1 pound of sweet potatoes equals about three medium whole, 2 cups mashed, or 3 1/2 to 4 cups chopped."

However, size does matter in this case. HowMuchIsIn.com reports that when it comes to these root veggies, 1 pound of them "is equal to 2 large or 3 medium sweet potatoes."

Other ways of determining how many of these potatoes you need for different measurements depend on whether they're being diced, sliced, cubed, or mashed can make a difference too. "We found that it took 1.25 medium sweet potatoes to obtain 1 cup of sliced potato," the site notes. "When cubing, we needed 1.3 sweet potatoes to reach the 1 cup mark."

So if you're trying to figure out how many sweet potatoes you'll need for a dish to go alongside your green beans, serving size and type of measurement may matter. If you've got one large sweet potato, it doesn't sound like that generally equals a pound. When in doubt, use a scale and if it's your first time working on it, just be kind to yourself and have fun figuring it out!