People Are Losing Their Minds Over Al Roker’s Name For His Mom’s Thanksgiving Sweet Potato Dish

In a segment on the Today show on Wednesday, hosts Al Roker and Dylan Dreyer demonstrated how to make their family’s favorite Thanksgiving dishes before a panel of expert judges. While Dreyer and her husband Brian went with a relatively safe crab dip, Al Roker and his brother Chris introduced both the panel and viewing audience at home to their mother’s “sweet potato poon.”

Sweet potato poon, if you’re wondering, involves an eyebrow-raising mixture of boiled, cubed sweet potatoes, an entire stick of butter, flour, crushed pineapple, brown sugar, salt, all-spice, cinnamon, and what seems to be a disturbing amount of baking powder. The concoction is then baked for 20 minutes before being covered in marshmallows and put under the broiler.

Regardless of whether or not that sounds appetizing, this word “poon” does not seem to mean what Al Roker thinks it does, barring a cursory search of Urban Dictionary. When asked why the dish is called that, Roker offered the explanation, “Because that’s what my mother told us it was.”

Cool cool cool. That may be all well and good, but perhaps the Roker siblings should have done a bit of friendly rebranding before unleashing the dish on this unsuspecting world, because “sweet potato poon” soon began trending on Twitter for absolutely the wrong reason.

If you’re so inclined, you can watch the full segment below:

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