Sweet potatoes in storage got too cold?

General Gardening
#1

I have some sweet potatoes I harvested this fall, in storage in my basement. They look like they’re in really good condition, but the temperature got a little colder than is recommended. Normally, this area of my basement runs around 56 to 60°F. But after a couple of single digit nights and a lot of wind, this morning, the temperature down there was 52.

Is that cold enough to cause damage to them? I’ve read temperatures below 55 can cause some kind of hardening of the core.

#2

Have eaten them as a child where they were stored in an interior closet and it actually got below 32 degrees. (Wood stove for heat and cooking only back then.) Some of them did’t bake right after that experience as I recall, but we still had our “seed” potatoes to plant the next year, so it didn’t rot all of them. Don’t recall the year, but probably in the 1960’s.