A desire to meet people and share his love for sweet potatoes brought John Correa from New Mexico to Vardaman last weekend.
Correa spent the day Friday baking 1,000 sweet potato biscuits in the kitchen of Sweet Potato Sweets and then sold them at Saturday’s festival with all the proceeds going toward Vardaman Elementary. Approximately $1,500 was raised from his efforts for the school.
“I’ve met so many great people here,” Correa said with his hands deep in dough. “I’m loving Mississippi. It’s been first hand experience with Southern hospitality.”
Correa is a retired principal from an elementary school in Monticello, New York, approximately 90 miles north of New York City. It was there he first discovered sweet potato biscuits.
“We would have a breakfast every Friday. It was very simple, just coffee and bagels and then it morphed into something bigger,” he said. “A teacher brought some sweet potato biscuits one time and I loved them. I twisted her arm a little and got the recipe out of her. I refined it to my taste and people loved it. I wouldn’t give that recipe to anybody. It’s all I got.”
Correa started making them for his family and at Thanksgiving and they continued to be a hit.
“After I retired, I moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico and I started making them for a coffee shop there,” he said.
Curious how widespread the appeal might be for his sweet potato biscuits, Correa decided he wanted to see how they would play in the South.
“I found some biscuit competitions in Memphis and other places, but that was way too competitive for me,” he explained. “I wanted something more personal. That’s when I found Vardaman.”
He contacted City Hall in the Sweet Potato Capital and told them he “was on a sweet potato journey.”
“They had to put a lot of trust in me,” he said. “They put me in contact with the right people and now I’m here.”
He landed at Sweet Potato Sweets where they opened up their kitchen to let him bake his thousand biscuits, which was a lot harder than he expected.
“It’s amazing what they do here every day,” he said of Sweet Potato Sweets. “The other day they made 2,000 pies like it was nothing. I’m working on a scale where I’m used to doing only 30 biscuits at a time and now I’m trying to make 1,000.”
The first batch didn’t come out exactly as he wanted so he kept refining.
“I have put the Beauregard (sweet potato) on such a high pedestal. It’s different from the sweet potatoes I’m used to dealing with,” he said.
Correa explained that his biscuit is much denser than the typical southern variety.
“Baking is a lot of chemistry. My recipe uses hot melted butter which produces a more dense biscuit,” Correa said. “Most biscuits around here use cold butter which makes it lighter. It’s definitely different. I’m curious to see how people like them.”
“I’ve had many who say they don’t like sweet potatoes but they like the biscuits. My standards are very high.”
Correa sold more than 600 biscuits at the festival for $1 each with all the proceeds going toward the purchase of new books in the Vardaman Elementary library.
“It appealed to me that I started in elementary school and I’m going to end in elementary school. I wanted to do it as a fundraiser for the school.”
He was hoping local students from the elementary school might could work in the booth and help sell the biscuits at the festival but was informed that would have to go through the school board for approval and there wouldn’t be time.
“As a former administrator, I understand processes,” Correa said. “I’m having a great time at this.”
“My love for these biscuits. They have been a vehicle for connecting with people whether back in the old elementary school, family and friends. I’m excited to be here experiencing all of this.”