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Sweet Potato Balls

Sweet potato balls are fried balls made from boiled sweet potatoes, cream or milk, salt, butter, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Sweet Potato Balls

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the potatoes

  1. Boil and skin the sweet potatoes, then run them through a colander.

  2. Mix the potatoes with cream or milk, salt, and butter.

Form and fry

  1. Form the mixture into balls, coat them in flour.

  2. Fry the balls in hot butter until golden brown.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Sweet potato + flourtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together627 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sweet potato + buttertop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,491 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Cream + flourtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Sweet potatoes
Make up the bulk of the balls and give them a soft, starchy body.
Cream or milk
Adds moisture and richness, keeping the mash soft and smooth.
Butter
Adds fat and flavor to the mash, and helps the outside brown when frying.
Flour
Forms a thin coating that helps the outside brown and crisp in the fat.

The step that matters

Frying in hot butter until golden brown. If the butter is too hot, the outside browns and burns before the center heats through. If it is too cool, the balls absorb grease and turn heavy. Moderate, steady heat browns the flour coating evenly through the Maillard reaction.

Swap the sweet potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, butter, flour):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Sweet potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, butter, flour. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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