Photo by Jill Moore

“At first I was going to use squash,” Rose Jones recalled, but then she changed her mind to sweet potatoes. “Because I love sweet potatoes.”

And so it was that sweet potatoes became the defining ingredient in the recipe she was planning to enter into the biscuit cook-off at the annual Natchez Food and Wine Festival a few years ago.

“A lot of people make sweet potato biscuits,” said Regina Charboneau. “But hers were really fluffy and had a lot of sweet potato flavor. It’s hard to get the right consistency and keep them light.”

Charboneau knows of what she speaks, having won acclaim for her own biscuits and as one of those in charge of the biscuit cook-off in a town that has proclaimed itself the Biscuit Capital of the World, all of which made the nationally noted Natchez chef the perfect curator for this category.

“As sourdough bread is to San Francisco, biscuits are to Natchez,” she said. “You find them at every meal. I do them for cocktail parties with smoked turkey and cranberry chutney. Bingo Starr at the Carriage House (the venerable dining destination next to Natchez’s historic Stanton Hall) does a great pimento cheese biscuit that they put under the broiler.

“We have so many good biscuit makers that it was just close,” Charboneau recalled of that particular competition which Jones ultimately did not win.

But Jones’ biscuits went on to win the hearts of diners at Dunleith Plantation, where she’s the lunch and catering chef, and now yours, having been chosen your favorite biscuit in voting among several of the city’s finest.

And should you wish to throw your chef’s hat into the ring for an upcoming competition, Charboneau is willing to share a secret.

“You cannot over-mix and overwork the biscuit. That’s something we would all agree on,” she said, referencing the creative minds behind all of her nominated biscuits. “You over-mix the fat and it’s not going to be as light and flakey.”

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