Sweet Potato Biscuits

We like to use sweet potato biscuit during the holiday season to make little cocktail sandwiches for a buffet. Simply cut the biscuits open and lay them out assembly line style. We stuff some sandwiches with roasted turkey breast and cranberry chutney. Others we make with a roast ham and grainy mustard.

The biscuits you see here are not sweet potato biscuits but our other favorite, buttermilk biscuits. The recipes are very similar, however, and the standard admonitions apply: Don't work the dough too much, and bake at a fairly high temperature.

The sweet potatoes do give the biscuits a festive air. We use the recipe in Bill Neal's Biscuits, Spoonbread, and Sweet Potato Pie.

2 cups low-gluten all-purpose flour (such as White Lily or Gold Medal)

Heaping 1/2 teaspoon salt

3 1/4 teaspoon baking powder

5 tablespoons chilled butter

4 ounces (1/2 cup) sweet potato, either roasted and riced, or pureed from a can

7/8 cup whole milk

Preheat oven to 475 degrees.

Mix the dry ingredients in a large bowl. Add the butter in pieces and work it into the flour using quick pinching motions of the fingers. The flour and butter should be completely incorporated, until it looks a little like sand. Mix in sweet potato. Add milk and stir until dough forms a ball.

Turn dough out onto a lightly floured surface. Knead lightly, about 10 strokes. Stop as soon as the dough begins to look smooth.

Roll dough out to a thickness of about 3/4 inch, then cut into 2-inch rounds. Place on an ungreased baking sheet and place in the oven until biscuits are lightly browned, about 8 minutes.

Note: My wife thinks the standard oven temperatures recommended for baking biscuits--475 to 500 degrees--are too high. She likes to cook hers at 425 degrees, and I must say, they are delicious: light and airy.

Kids Make Buttermilk Biscuits

One of the cleverest culinary inventions was the chemical rising agent. With simple baking powder you can make sumptuous scones, fluffy muffins and airy biscuits--all without the hassle of proofing yeast. This was a real boon to the early pioneers, who obviously didn't have room in their covered wagons for colonies of yeast.

As our "food appreciation" classes continue their way south on a virtual world culinary tour, we had to stop and make some buttermilk biscuits to go with our collard greens and Hoppin' John. The acid in buttermilk easily reacts with the base chemical in baking powder to make our biscuits rise. Another secret is to find a lighter-than-usual flour to make the biscuits lighter than usual as well.

What you are looking for is less protein in the flour. You can do this by combining cake flour with all-purpose flour. Or seek out a lighter all-purpose flour such as White Lily, popular in the South. To make these biscuits, I scoured the local supermarkets and could find neither cake flour nor White Lily (my wife swears the Harris Teeter's store in Virginia sells it, but apparently not the store near us in the District of Columbia.)

But here's a little known secret: the ubiquitous Gold Medal flour also has reduced protein. You can tell by looking at the nutritional information on the side of the package. Gold Medal lists three grams of protein per serving. Virtually every other all-purpose flour lists four grams of protein. So we just used Gold Medal.

Biscuits will come out tough if the dough is worked too much. So just mix it until it holds together. The other requirement is to have a very hot oven and to set the biscuits on the middle rack so that they rise up and bake quickly--evenly--without burning. Our recipe is adapted from one given on the back of a bag of White Lily flour.

2 cups White Lily flour (or use Gold Medal)

1 tablespoon baking powder

1 teaspoon salt

1/4 cup chilled butter (4 tablespoons)

7/8 cup buttermilk

Preheat oven to 475 degrees

In a large mixing bowl, combine flour, baking powder and salt and whisk together well. Add the chilled butter to the dry mix in small pieces, then cut it in with rapid finger movement, pinching the butter and flour together until the butter is completely incorporated and the finished mix is more like sand. Pour in the buttermilk and mix only until the buttermilk is fully incorporated. The dough may still be in pieces at this point.

Pour the dough out onto a lightly floured work surface and press it together into a ball. Knead the dough just two or three times, then roll it out to 1/2-inch thickness or even a bit thicker. Use a 2 1/2-inch biscuit cutter to cut the dough into 12 rounds. Place these on an ungreased baking pan and bake on the middle rack of the oven just until they rise and begin to brown, about 8 minutes.

When the biscuits have cooled slightly, you can use a fork or a knife to pry them open. Spread them generously with butter and serve with the apple butter you canned in October.

True Buttermilk Biscuits

Sometimes the presence of a single ingredient in the pantry takes us places we would not ordinarily go.

Part of my reward for helping farmer friend Mike Klein butcher his turkeys this year was a small bottle of genuine buttermilk. Well, it wasn't just any bottle. It was a Coca Cola bottle he'd cleaned and reclaimed because I suppose he didn't have anything else to put the buttermilk in. So along with our turkey, a stewing chicken and some pickling watermelons, I walked away from the farm with this Coca Cola bottle half-filled with a milky-yellowish liquid I wasn't quite sure what to do with.

Finding authentic buttermilk these days, like so much else that used to arrive in its natural state from the farm to the grocery store, seems darned near impossible. Sometimes at the farmer's market you will see a vendor making a big deal of selling quarts of "real" buttermilk. You may then walk away mumbling to yourself, wondering what the difference is between the "real" buttermilk being sold at the farmer's market and the stuff you buy in a plastic carton at the grocery stored labeled "buttermilk."

Originally, "buttermilk" was the liquid left over from the process of churning cream into butter. It is tart, low-fat, and sometimes flecked with bits of butter. Nowadays, "buttermilk" is a manufactured, cultured product made by adding lactic acid bacteria to regular or skin milk, then fermenting it for a period of days. It's that acidity that makes buttermilk ideal for a chemical rise in baking, as in pancakes and biscuits. Because of the acidity, it will also keep for months in the refrigerator without going bad.

Reading the labels on the "buttermilk" products at the supermarket can be a jolt to the senses. When we were in Maine over the summer, I found three varieties of buttermilk under three different labels at the local grocery. One of them listed the following ingredients: "pasteurized culture fat-free milk, modified food starch, mono and diglycerides, carrageenan, locust bean gum."

Who needs all that?

Anyway, last night the stars seemed to line up perfectly for that Coca Cola bottle of buttermilk sitting in the fridge. I had several different leftovers, including some of the intensely flavorful pilaf from last week's pot roast, pumpkin and wild rice pilaf, cooked squash, salad greens. The buttermilk called out to me. It wanted to be turned into biscuits.

The recipe I use is from Bill Neal's classic text, Biscuits, Spoonbread, and Sweet Potato Pie. This is a perfect example of a chemical rise in baking, or pairing acid and base ingredients with a liquid to create carbon dioxide, which puts the puff in the baked good.

As Neal explains, "The acceptance and availability of reliable commercial baking powders has become the general principle of Southern home baking, overshadowing yeast, eggs, and general arm power."

Preheat oven to 500 degrees.

In a bowl, mix 2 cups all-purpose flour, a heaping 1/2-teaspoon salt, 3 1/14 teaspoons baking powder, 1 teaspoon sugar, 1/2 teaspoon baking soda, 5 tablespoons chilled shortening (lard or butter or a combination). Using fingers, quickly work the shortening into the dry ingredients until every bit of the flour is combined with a bit of fat. Add 7/8 cup buttermilk and stir vigorously until a ball forms.

The secret to light, crumbly biscuits it to work the dough as little as possible, or only as much as necessary. You don't knead this dough hardly at all--more like pushing it this way and that until it holds together. Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface, dusting the dough with a little more flour if it seems too sticky. Pat the dough into a circle about 1/2-inch thick and cut into 2-inch rounds (I use a biscuit cutter for this, dipping the cutter into flour to keep the dough from sticking).

Transfer the rounds to an ungreased baking sheet and place in the oven for about 8 minutes, or until the tops have turned golden. Serve warm with butter and your favorite jam or preserves.