The Sweet Potato Queens' Big-Ass Cookbook (and Financial Planner) by Jill Conner Browne

Author:Jill Conner Browne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9781400082841
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2004-11-30T05:00:00+00:00

Sweet Potato Biscuits

My good friend Maurice Hinton was kind enough to share this recipe with me. (He could be of so much more help to me if only he would help me design new SPQ outfits. He is the best costume maker I personally have ever seen in the whole world.) I shared my recipe with our Official Chef, Chris Lambert, who is responsible for the absolutely dee-vine SPQ Sunday-After-the-Parade Brunch. Those who have been to that stellar event know how good these biscuits are.

Now, this is a Southern biscuit recipe, so there are no exact measurements. Biscuits being the temperamental creatures that they are, a whole lot of trial and error goes into learning the “feel” of good biscuit dough, so I’m just going to tell you your starting point and you’ll have to fool with it in your own kitchen until you find the right mix for you. It will vary every time you make them yourself, too; that’s just the nature of biscuits. It took me forty years to learn how to make biscuits. No matter what I did—even if I just used Bisquick—I ended up with crackers, not biscuits. They tasted fine but the consistency was more on the thin and crispy side than the desired fluffy. Then one day I just got up and decided that I could too make biscuits and I was by God going to, and so I did and I’ve been makin’ them ever since. Part of making biscuits is attitude, I reckon. With that in mind, if you want these Sweet Potato Biscuits, just decide that you’re gonna keep at it until they make you happy. This recipe makes about a thousand, so you’ve got plenty of dough to experiment with.

Start by boiling 5 good-sized sweet potatoes until they get soft, then let ’em cool and slip the peelings off and mix in a few cups sugar and mash it all up. I have put as few as 3 and as many as 5 cups of sugar. You’ve got to taste the dough and see what it needs—you can always add more; taking it out is a bitch and, well, nearly impossible, so watch it. Do your regular biscuit thing of 4 to 5 cups self-rising flour, 2 cups shortening (I frequently use butter—yum!), and 1 to 2 cups buttermilk. Work your sweetened sweet potato stuff in when you’re doing the butter and don’t overwork your dough—that’s how you get crackers. When it’s of a consistency that’s not sticking to your hands like wallpaper paste but hangs together in proper biscuit fashion, it’s ready to become biscuits. If the dough’s too wet, add more flour; if it’s too dry, add buttermilk; if it’s not sweet enough, put some more sugar in there. They’re your biscuits, they only have to please you. You can drop them or you can roll them out and cut them.

Then bake them at 400 on an ungreased pan until they get browned enough to please you.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.