Sourdough Sweet Potato Biscuits from Sourdough Brandon

Sourdough Sweet Potato Biscuits - made May 20, 2025 from Sourdough Brandon

280 grams all-purpose flour

1 tablespoon baking powder

1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt

113 grams (1 stick) unsalted butter, cold and cut into small cubes

232 grams mashed sweet potatoes

1 tablespoon brown sugar

100 grams sourdough discard

61 grams (1/4 cup) buttermilk plus more for brushing tops

1. Line baking sheet with parchment paper.
2. In a mixing bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder and salt; set aside.
3. In another mixing bowl, mix sweet potatoes, brown sugar, sourdough discard and buttermilk until combined.
4. Toss the cold, cubed butter into the dry ingredients and cut into the flour until the butter is in pea-sized pieces.
5. Add the wet ingredients to bowl and use a fork to mix until clumps form and the mixture is distributed throughout. Drizzle more buttermilk if needed into the mixture. The mixture may still be quite dry but will come together in the next step. 
6. Sprinkle work surface with a generous dusting of flour. Dump the dough onto the work surface and pat into a rectangle about 3/4 inch thick. Use a bench scraper to divide into four equal pieces. Stack them on top of each other and use your hands to press down and pat back into a rectangle. Repeat two more times to further laminate the dough and create flaky layers.
7. After the last stacking, pat the dough into a 1-inch thick square. Use the bench scraper to cut 9 equal-sized squares. Freeze the biscuits for at least 15 minutes.
8. Preheat oven to 425 degrees F. Evenly space the frozen biscuits on the prepared baking sheet and brush the tops with buttermilk.
9. Bake for 20-23 minutes or until the tops are golden brown. Serve warm with butter.

how the "dough" looked when it was first turned out of the bowl

First off, I'm going to say this was a laughable failure on my part. I say my part as I'm sure others have made this recipe just fine, as evidenced by the original blog post from Sourdough Brandon. I'm not a dab hand at making biscuits as I rarely make them so my ineptitude at biscuit making probably contributed to the failure.

I also say laughable because I really did have to laugh at how terribly the process went for me. The dough as mixed according to the directions was too dry. I ended up doubling the amount of buttermilk and it was still too dry. I tried the directions of cutting the dough into 4 pieces to stack for the lamination and the floury mass I can't really call dough fell apart and was not amenable to being stacked.

I squished the dough together and had a half-assed attempt at cutting it out into biscuits. 

You can see below how much flour dust was still left after cutting out the biscuits. And even then, the ones above barely held together.

I think I went wrong in a couple of places. I used Japanese or murasaki sweet potatoes and they just weren't as moist as regular yellow sweet potatoes. My sourdough starter also seemed a bit more dry and doughy rather than a wet starter. Plus, I probably should've just kept adding buttermilk until the dough at least held together and was shaggy rather than dry flour.

Given all my issues with the dough, this definitely was not flaky or laminated. It was, not surprisingly, rather doughy and dense, even after baking it more than 15 minutes than the prescribed time. 

The flavor of the murasaki sweet potatoes also wasn't very pronounced. The biscuits weren't horrible and the taste test biscuit went down just fine, warm and slathered with butter. But next time, I would definitely use regular sweet potatoes and add enough buttermilk to make that shaggy dough.