Cooking Demonstration of Thomas Jefferson’s Sweet Potato-Pecan Biscuits from A Taste of History Cookbook by Walter Staib
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00:00 Title
00:10 Introduction
00:50 Day Before Cooking Prep
02:40 Ingredients, Tools & Setup
03:56 Making the Dough
16:53 Rolling the Dough & Cutting the Biscuits
20:36 Egg Wash & Baking the Biscuits
22:00 The Final Result
Glory Glory hallelu Glory Glory happy Independence Day to all of my American viewers in honor of the holiday I’ll be making Thomas Jefferson’s sweet potato pecan biscuits from a taste of History by Walter stab this book is a bit of a pop culture book as it follows along with the taste of History PBS show which is uh PBS’s public broadcasting uh Channel here in the United States but the recipes in it that I’ve tried so far have come out pretty good uh the turkey and rudas stew recipe was a particular favorite of mine that being said it is a TV show cookbook and I would not recommend it as an actual introduction or guide to American Cuisine more of a fun book to pick and choose recipes that seem interesting to you this is one of those recipes that requires a little bit of preparation and work ahead of time before you really get started with the recipe in Earnest in this case obviously these are our sweet potato biscuits so sweet potatoes are on part of the ingredients list now here we have our sweet potatoes and what we need to do is preheat an oven to 425° F and we’re going to take these uh they’ve already been pre-washed we’re going to take them and we’re just going to prick use a fork you don’t have to get in there but you just want to make sure we’re we’re penetrating the skin on all of the sides of the potato and yeah once we get this done all right and then we’re going to brush them in vegetable oil make sure you get a good coating over the whole thing and we’re going to do that with each one of our potatoes now the reason that we’re doing this is because we have to bake these potatoes to get them soft and the reason we want to do it the night before you actually make these is that when you put these in the refrigerator after they’re done uh wrap them in foil and put them in the refrigerator overnight that they get sweeter after they’ve been cooked when they have a long time to um sort of sit in stew in their own juice jues so all right we’re going to do this I’m going to finish up with the other two and then we’re going to put them in the oven and then in the refrigerator and then we will be on to the next step tomorrow here is our ingredients and setup for making Thomas Jefferson’s sweet potato pecan biscuits uh you’re going to need light brown sugar you’re going to need chopped pecans you’re going to need allspice cinnamon Ginger baking powder and Nutmeg as well as buttermilk cubed cold butter make sure it’s cold that’s important to the chemistry of this here is our sweet potatoes um that we cooked yesterday and have had overnight the Skins just peel off uh once you’re ready to use them the next day you don’t even need a vegetable peeler or anything like that they just come off and then also I hand ground some cloves over here because I didn’t have any powdered cloves um but that’s what that is so as far as tools we’re going to need oh six cups of flour here in the middle as well as far as tools we’re going to use this to cut the butter into the dough um I’ll put a link in the description to one of these if you don’t have them but it’s super useful if you’re going to do a lot of baking um our handy spatula wooden spoon to mix and a hand grater is another tool that I also find extremely useful for various things you know fresh ginger but in this case it’s going to be used for doing some fine grading of some nutmeg all right let’s get started okay we’re going to start by combining all of the dry ingredients um or the spices and sugars so we’ll go ahead and put sugar in with the flour as well go ahead and throw those cloves in there and next is baking [Music] powder all right okay and some ginger I love how a lot of baking combines multiple spices together um because somehow the combination of them and you really don’t have to be at least in my experience you do not need to be super exact with spices like I just sort of put one in there I just kind of you can kind of use the the tablespoon teaspoon as a guideline um because yeah if there A lot of times spices are honestly just so strong that a little more than a tablespoon is not going to hurt anything okay next we’re going to add our salt okay and then we’re going to grate a little bit of nutmeg in there says about a teaspoon so you can just kind of eyeball it there’s plenty of spices in here it’s not going to be part of the reason by the way a lot of recipes will say to use whole nutmeg like I’m doing right now is because the ground nutmeg you get in stores is actually just the center um there’s actually another there’s actually another U the coating the the wrapper of the nutmeg itself is called mace it’s another spice but if you’re grading a whole nutmeg then you get both at the same time okay so let’s go ahead and just mix this up and get rid of any if you’re see there was a hard bit in the but if you’re um sugar has any lumps in or anything like that you can go ahead and start to break that up now as you mix everything together and you’re really really want to try to get a uniform mixture of spices and flour here all right so next thing we’re going to do is add our chilled butter uh so let’s go ahead and do that and you can do this you can do this with your hand you don’t have to do it with a a cutter to cut the butter in um the cutter can just sometimes especially the early stages of doing this can really sort of make things a little easier so let’s go ahead and and this can be a little bit of work because what you want to do is oh the cutter also helps you keep the butter chilled because again you want it to stay chilled to some extent uh and your hands would obviously warm up that butter and you don’t really want that even though we’re also going to be adding some other cold elements here and that smells good I’m going to cheat just a little bit and break some of these lumps up a little bit this is definitely an activity we’re having strong arms helps because you want to sort of cut that butter and you’re it’s going to butter is going to mix in and it’s going to give you sort of a uh Sandy but lumpy texture you can kind of see that starting to happen already here and this recipe does if you’re following along with the book make quite a few um because this is going to be for my fourth of July party um or rather uh yeah for my fourth of July party it’s going to be a lot of people there um at least 10 and so it never hurts to have enough where nobody feels like uh should I take another one if I really want another one or if you can anyway it’s always good to to make people feel like there’s there’s plenty to go around and this can make two to three dozen bsiness depending on the size I also kind of like making the biscuits bigger you know sort of big man sized uh than than what the recipes usually call for which is usually more like a two or a 2 and 1/2 inch biscuit cutter I usually go for one a little bigger than that okay all right you see how that text texture is now starting to become like moist sand here not moist sand uh like lumpy sand that is really um what we’re going for okay let’s get those bits of butter out of there good stuff okay now we can go ahead and toss in chops pecans and go ahead and mix that as well and make sure you’re really getting your hand in there otherwise you’ll end up if you don’t really get in there then you’ll you’ll end up with a big pile of like flour or some other ingredient concentrated at the bottom which you you really don’t want okay now we’re going to you’re going to see how soft these sweet potatoes are we’re going to mix in we’re just going to you don’t even yeah you don’t even need to do anything special this stuff breaks up on its own but we’re going to add the sweet potatoes into the mixture which is sort of our first wet element if you see any like leftover skins go ahead and just uh remove those that’s not even really a skin it’s sort of just an outer or an inner if you’re looking at it from our perspective it would be the inner skin of the potato yep that just became mush which is good that’s what we want let’s go ahead and start just and this is these are uh these potatoes definitely make sure you’re basically just pulling them straight from the fridge into uh your batter uh because this is another element A lot of times when you’re baking um you want elements to be chilled particularly sort of Rich pastry type doughs like P dough um that’s probably the most common one but Buttermilk Biscuits a lot of this kind of stuff um you want there to be um you want the elements to be cold uh because that helps well I’m actually not sure chemistry-wise if you know I’d be happy for you to leave it in the comments but all I know is it works and that’s the most important thing all right all right I’m going to finish mixing this uh I’m not going to make you guys sit here and watch cuz this is going to take a minute and then we’ll pick it up at the next step all right so we’ve got this mixed in pretty well here now we want to just you may not even need to use all of the buttermilk we’re just going to put a little bit in a time here and work it in until we can get this into it’s close already honestly but we want to get this into where it just becomes a solid ball of dough those sweet potatoes have a lot of and you can see though there’s still some some crusty bits in there at this point I’m using at this point I’m using the wooden spoon instead of my hands because I just wiped down and cleaned up and it’s always important to clean while you cook um so you don’t end up with such a a massive mess afterwards uh see just just like that if I had not cleaned up it would be even bigger or something buttermilk by the way you can make um I don’t just because my local grocery stores carry it in in small little pint size containers and we’re getting real close now to the texture that we want want for this dough um but it’s just made you can find recipes online for it uh it’s just made with mixing whole milk and an acid usually some sort of citrus juice and then letting that sit and do its chemical thing this is going to make a loose sticky dough here you can see how people used to be when people would you know Housewives mad respect for for old Housewives back in the day but when people would used to spend all day cooking uh how much physical effort it is right like people probably burned so many more calories back then all right and so you can see it’s sort of becoming one big lump here and that is we’re like 99% of the way there and doing it with this wooden spoon also kind of just gives flour takes some time to absorb liquids and so giving it going slow and giving it a little time to absorb will yield a better result sometimes people will just immediately think oh it doesn’t look immediately look the way I want it to where if you just let it sit for a few minutes it would have okay we are done with the dough all right that’s what it should look like um I’m going to go ahead and get the rolling mat out uh so that we can roll and cut our biscuits and we’ll be back all right here we go so we’re going to go ahead and dust our rolling surface here here with flour and this is a pretty sticky dough so you’re definitely going to want to roll your rolling pen with flour also and you basically can’t really overdo it in this for this particular recipe because this dough is so sticky so let’s go ahead and get all this dough out probably should flour your hands too if you’re going to be working with it uh just flour flour everything okay so let’s go ahead and make a cushion shape and let’s start to roll this out this is going to yield a lot so uh be mindful of how and don’t don’t hesitate so see how see how I just had a piece of potato stick like I said this is a sticky dough so reflower your rolling pen frequently uh to stop the dough from sticking and you’re going to want to get about a half inch half inch thickness and this is not a recipe that requires exactness when it comes to the thickness so just eyeball it that’s what people used to do ah look at that see that’s what I get for not not flowering okay so we’re going to cut I like like I said I’m using a bigger cutter because I like bigger biscuits so and that did not come out clean but again it’s a it’s a wet dough that can be manipulated so you can make it clean and just put them on go ahead and arrange them you don’t need to you don’t need to have um leave a lot of space because this recipe will not uh spread out horizontally they will puff up vertically but they won’t spread out horizontally so all right and that’s all there is to this part um there’s one more part before we go in the oven but I’m going to finish cutting all these biscuits first and then I’ll come back and show you that part okay we have our sheet uh L lined with biscuits here 16 of them on this sheet and so this is just a simple egg wash one egg mixed with a teaspoon of water and we’re just going to before these go into the oven uh the oven’s at 425 fahit by the way we’re just going to base the top of these so they develop that nice wonderful Brown top and everyone Associates with buttermilk biscuits if if you’re from Europe or or other places uh besides America um what we call biscuits you probably call scones so they’re very they’re not and they’re not still not exactly the same as each other but they’re really close um so yeah that’s uh if if you want an idea if you’ve never eaten something like this before this the south southern part of the United States is really kind of biscuit culture right there’s all sorts of like YouTube videos of British kids try biscuits and gravy for the first time which is if you’re in the South and and you’re at a local restaurant don’t go to like a chain like IHOP or something like that and get biscuits and gravy but if you see a local restaurant you’re traveling in the deep south of the United States definitely get yourself some biscuits and gravy um or just some biscuits in general biscuits are really good Okay so we’ve based all those these are going to go in the oven for about 15 minutes and I’ll show you the result all right here is the final result these look and smell really good I made a couple tall boys here to show you you can see how big and thick and crusty with that nice brown glaze on top um they’re still a little bit warm I did let them cool for a little bit um but yeah these would go great with apple butter I think I’m going to Stage some with some syrup over the top for for the the title card of this video but this is Thomas Jefferson’s sweet potato pecan biscuits happy 4th of July happy birthday America if you like my content please like And subscribe and we’ll see you next time
1 Comment
Looks great