Brown Butter and Sage Sweet Potato Biscuits
There are three kids and one large husband in this house, so when baked potatoes go in the oven, it’s a baker’s dozen at a time. In the event that your better half brings home dinner after you’ve put a bushel of tubers in the oven, we’ve got a great way to use them up (this also works if you got over generous with roasting a butternut or acorn squash).
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Ingredients
- 12 ounces Sweet potatoes 335g, roasted and peeled (from about 2 medium potatoes)
- 2 tsp Salt 8g
- 2 Tbsp Brown sugar 28g
- 2 ounces Butter 56g, for melting
- 4 leaves Sage
- 6 ounces Super cold butter 170g, , cubed
- 1-3/4 cups Flour 228g
- 1 Tbsp Baking powder
- 1/2 tsp Baking soda
- 1/3 cup Buttermilk 80g
Instructions
- Place the butter for melting in a pot with the sage. Melt the butter over medium heat until it begins to brown. Remove from heat immediately and pour into a medium-sized bowl, reserving the sage for serving later. Using a fork, mash the sweet potatoes and salt into the browned butter.
- Mix the flour, brown sugar, baking powder and baking soda into a large bowl. Take the cold butter cubes and toss them into these dry ingredients. Flake the butter into the flour (also called sanding) by rubbing the cold butter into a flake between your thumb and index and middle finger. These flakes are what make up the flaky layers, so keep them cold!
- Pour the buttermilk over the sweet potato. Pour this into your dry ingredients and, with a wooden spoon, mix until just barely combined. A few streaks of flour is ok. Your dough should feel a little sticky but not too wet. Add a touch of milk or flour if you need to.
- Dump the dough onto a lightly floured surface and hit it to flatten it with a flat, open hand a few times. Fold the dough like a letter and hit a few more times until it is 1-1/2″ thick. Place the dough in the freezer for 30 minutes while you preheat the oven to 425 F.
- Line a cookie sheet with parchment paper. Take a cookie cutter, biscuit cutter or the top of a jar and cut out your biscuits- flour the cutter, then cut with one heavy stab of the cutter at a time, picking it up without twisting and hitting onto the cookie sheet if the biscuit doesn’t come out on its own. Sprinkle with cheese, if desired, or a touch of sea salt.
- Bake for 15-20 minutes, depending on how big you cut them.
Notes
The secret to biscuits is simple: the worse-looking and more difficult the dough it to work with, the better you biscuits will be. Flaky layers are created by cold pieces of butter go into a hot oven. The water trapped in the butter (butter is made up of about 81% fat and 19% water), under pressure in the oven, releases the water as steam. The resulting air pockets are what propel the biscuits to their unearthly heights.
