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Sweet Potato Supper Biscuits
1 cup boiled, mashed sweet potatoes 1/2 cup butter 1 tablespoon sugar 1 teaspoon salt 2/3 cup buttermilk 1/4 teaspoon baking soda Flour to make stiff dough Mix all ingredients except flour to smooth batter, then work in the sifted flour with fingers till dough is stiff and smooth. Roll out 1/2 inch thick, cut out, bake in hot oven 400 degrees until done. Serve with apple sauce or stewed fruit.
A soft potato biscuit that depends entirely on how much flour you add, since the recipe never names an amount. Work by feel and stop early.
- The hinge: flour by feel, not by cupSweet potatoes vary enormously in moisture, which is why the original leaves the flour open. Expect roughly 2 to 2 1/2 cups of sifted all-purpose flour, added a half cup at a time, and stop as soon as the dough holds together and is no longer sticky. Every extra spoonful past that point trades tenderness for toughness.
- Cook the potato dryBoiled and mashed, as written, gives a wet mash and drives the flour up. Drain the potatoes well and let them steam dry in the hot pan for a minute; baking them instead and scooping out the flesh gives a drier, sweeter mash and a lighter biscuit.
- Mash cold or warmWarm potato will melt the butter into the mash rather than leaving it in flakes. Either mash the potato with the butter while both are warm and accept a cake-like crumb, or cool the mash fully and cut in cold butter for something flakier.
- The leavening is deliberately lightThe leavening is light -- A quarter teaspoon of soda against 2/3 cup buttermilk gives a modest lift, and these will not rise like a baking-powder biscuit. If you want more height, a teaspoon of baking powder alongside the soda will do it; without it, expect a dense, moist biscuit.
- Mix the soda in lastSoda begins reacting with the buttermilk immediately. Have the oven at temperature and the pan ready before you combine them, and get the cut biscuits in without delay.
- Oven and time400F is correct for a "hot oven" here. At 1/2 inch thick, cut rounds take about 12 to 15 minutes; they brown less obviously than plain biscuits because of the potato, so judge by a firm top and a dry interior rather than deep color.
- YieldDepends on how much flour the dough takes, but a 2-inch cutter will give you well over a dozen. They are best within an hour of baking and go gummy if wrapped while warm.
- No buttermilkUse plain yogurt thinned with milk to pouring consistency, or 2/3 cup milk with 2 teaspoons lemon juice left to stand ten minutes. The acid is doing real work against the soda, so plain milk alone will not substitute.
Sweet potato biscuits belong to the Southern habit of stretching wheat flour with whatever starchy vegetable was on hand, a practice that long outlived the necessity behind it and survived because the results are good: the potato holds moisture and keeps the crumb soft for far longer than a plain flour biscuit manages. Buttermilk and soda place this squarely in the American quick-bread tradition that took hold once reliable chemical leavening became a pantry staple in the nineteenth century. The instruction to serve them with apple sauce or stewed fruit is worth noticing, since it treats the biscuit as a vehicle for preserved fruit rather than for meat or gravy.