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Dessert

Sweet Potato Bolls

A dough of boiled sweet potatoes, eggs, sugar, lard, butter, yeast, flour, and water, shaped into rolls and baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Sweet potato and flour work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 627 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Sweet Potato Bolls

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the potatoes and eggs

  1. Boil and peel the sweet potatoes.

  2. Beat the eggs.

  3. Mix the beaten eggs with the hot potatoes, sugar, lard, and butter.

Make the dough

  1. Stir in the yeast or dissolved leaven.

  2. Gradually work in flour and tepid water until a soft dough forms.

  3. Add coarse sea salt to taste.

  4. Let the dough rise.

Shape and bake

  1. Shape the risen dough into rolls.

  2. Bake the rolls.

  3. Serve hot with butter.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sweet potato + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,151 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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
Provide moisture, body, and natural sweetness to the soft dough.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and add richness and structure to the rolls.
Yeast
Produces gas as it ferments, making the dough rise and become light.
Flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the dough its structure and chew.
Lard
Adds fat that tenderizes the crumb and softens the texture.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and adds sweetness and some browning during baking.

The step that matters

Gradually work in flour and tepid water until a soft dough forms.. Adding flour gradually lets you judge the dough's texture. Too much flour makes the dough stiff, which limits rising and leaves the rolls dense. Tepid water keeps the yeast active without killing it.

Swap the sweet potato

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

  1. Chivefits about as well
  2. Leekfits about as well
  3. Shallotfits about as well
  4. Sweet potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar, 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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