Skip to main content
Bread

Sweet Potato Rolls

A yeast dough roll made with boiled sweet potatoes, eggs, sugar, lard, butter, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 Rolls

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Boil and peel the sweet potatoes.

  2. Beat the eggs in a bowl and mix in the hot sweet potatoes.

  3. Add sugar, lard, and butter to the mixture.

  4. Stir in the yeast or leaven dissolved in cold water.

  5. Gradually work in flour and tepid water until a soft dough forms, adding salt to taste.

Shape and bake

  1. Let the dough rise, then shape it into rolls.

  2. Bake the rolls and 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
Add moisture and a soft, tender crumb along with natural sweetness.
Eggs
Bind the dough and add richness and structure to the crumb.
Yeast
Produces gas as it ferments, making the dough rise and become light.
All-purpose flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the dough its structure.
Lard
Adds fat that tenderises the crumb and keeps the rolls soft.

The step that matters

Work in the flour and tepid water until a soft dough forms. Water hydrates the flour so gluten can develop, and the dough needs enough moisture to stay soft. Water that is too hot can kill yeast, so keeping it tepid protects the rise.

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.

You might also like

Potato BreadPotato Bread124 recipesCornbreadCornbread345 recipesBread PuddingBread Pudding336 recipesMilk Bread RollsMilk Bread Rolls242 recipes