Sweet Potato Biscuit Recipe (2024)

FAQs

What causes homemade biscuits to fall apart? ›

When the fat is cut too small, after baking there will be more, smaller air pockets left by the melting fat. The result is a baked product that crumbles. When cutting in shortening and other solid fats, cut only until the pieces of shortening are 1/8- to 1/4-inch in size.

So if you want a sweet, sweet potato, you have to cook it until it reaches 135–170°F (57–77°C). And you want to keep sweet potatoes in that range for as long as possible. That will maximize how sweet the potatoes taste.

For soft and fluffy biscuits, blend the liquid and dry ingredients just until the dough "resembles cottage cheese," Sonoskus says. This stops you from activating too much gluten in the flour and ending up with a tougher biscuit that doesn't rise as high.

Turn the dough out onto a well-floured surface and pat it down into a rough rectangle, about an inch thick. Fold it over and gently pat it down again. Repeat two more times. Cover the dough loosely with a kitchen towel and allow it to rest for 30 minutes.

Most biscuit recipes will tell you to fold or stack the dough in on itself once or twice, rolling it out in between stacking. If your favorite recipe isn't yielding the height that you'd like to see, consider adding an extra fold or two, which will create more layers.

Overworking (or Underworking) the Dough

The biscuits will be hard and tough if you stir the dough too much. They will have a floury, uneven texture if you don't mix enough. Our Test Kitchen cracked the code: Stir the dough 15 times for the perfect consistency and texture.

Many sweet potato pie recipes call for boiling the potatoes to cook them for the filling. We recommend steaming or baking the potato in the oven instead. The water removes some of the potato's flavor and nutrients, and the pie can turn out watery.

Along with anti-inflammatory properties, sweet potatoes have plenty of gut-friendly fiber, especially if you eat the skin. They are a mixture of soluble fiber, which can lower cholesterol and balance glucose, and insoluble fiber, which helps keep your bowels healthy and regular.

Is it better to boil or bake sweet potatoes? ›

Baking can also cause an 80% drop in vitamin A levels, twice as much as boiling. Therefore, from a nutritional standpoint, boiling rather than baking should be recommended for cooking sweet potato.

The most versatile and sweetest variation of sweet potatoes is the Beauregard. Throughout the United States, you will see this species stacked high in the grocery stores during the holiday season. Beauregard's have a bit of a stringy texture, but they stay soft: this is what makes them so popular.

Sweet potatoes are in the morning glory family, while yams belong to the lily family. Yams aren't as sweet as sweet potatoes, and they are starchier and drier. Their texture and flavor are more similar to potatoes or yuca.

Use flour with low protein content

To make extra tender biscuits, you don't want to develop a lot of gluten. Flours with a higher protein content develop gluten more readily. To get the soft biscuits you're after, Catherine recommends using for an all-purpose flour with a small amount of protein.

After testing hundreds of biscuits, the Southern Living Test Kitchen cooks found that grating a frozen stick of butter with the large holes of a box grater made the best dough and was much faster too. The ice-cold shreds of butter incorporate into the flour more evenly, improving the dough's flavor and texture.

The two keys to success in making the best biscuits are handling the dough as little as possible as well as using very cold solid fat (butter, shortening, or lard) and cold liquid. When the biscuits hit the oven, the cold liquid will start to evaporate creating steam which will help our biscuits get very tall.

Mixing. The multi-stage mixing method is preferred for its ability to produce consistent doughs which are not fully developed. Blending all dry ingredients to rub or cut the shortening into the flour until fat is fully distributed and pea-sized lumps are visible.