How Grits can Expand your Pleasures, like Pluff Mud
Like a tidepool reflecting the yellowing morning sun, the surface of my balmy bowl of grits is sheathed in melting butter. I run my spoon…
Like a tidepool reflecting the yellowing morning sun, the surface of my balmy bowl of grits is sheathed in melting butter. I run my spoon through the slow-cooked stone-ground grains, the creamy sand hiding nuggets of bacon waiting like tiny salty seashells to be discovered by my tongue.
It’s morning in the Low Country, a swath of South Carolina that runs along the coast, from Georgetown, south of Myrtle Beach, to Daufuskie Island, at the Georgia Border. This is the birthplace of grits, a comforting food often served for breakfast as a humble bed for bacon, cheese, and eggs.
Grits are made from dent corn, dented hard-kernel corn that you might find less-than-tasty in the raw and hard-to-digest. Dent varieties of corn are no competition for sweeter corns when it comes to eating fresh. Dent’s redeeming quality: being starchy. That’s not to fuss about if you enjoy a warm bowl of velvety grits.
A Southern Thing
You might see the hair on your Southern friend’s hackles rear up at the suggestion of grits made from a single-serving pouch or even quick-cook grits. There’s a reason that goes deeper than respect for Memaw.
The taste is better; stone ground grits hold up to four times the liquid when cooked compared to instant or quick-cook grits. The melted butter, chicken, or veggie stock is flavor that embeds itself with the grits as their tender hearts gently blossom during the slow-cooking process.
But if tasting better wasn’t enough to tip your seesaw on the side of taking a few extra minutes to make proper stone-ground grits, you should know that stone-ground grits contain more fiber and B vitamins than their wham-bam finish-in-minutes counterparts.
So, plop the nutrient factor onto the taste side of your teeter-totter and send those convenient pouches from that guy in the weird-shaped hat sailing towards the playground sandbox. Don’t worry, it’s a soft landing and the raccoons will help themselves later.
Distinguishing a Grit
Meanwhile, let’s go ahead and put out the fire of your burning question about what the heck is the difference between grits and polenta. Aren’t they basically the same ole corn meal?
Well, yes, but no. Polenta is made from the almost impossible-to-chew flint corn, ground into meal. Like there are grades of sandpaper, polenta, made from flint, is coarse, and grits, made from dent, is fine.
The distinction between grits and polenta comes down to the corn varieties that, when ground, produce different textures. Dent is most often used for the cornmeal in cornbread muffins and the batter for lovable hush puppies and coy catfish waiting for their sweet, crispy new coat.
In the Land of Grits
If you dig barefoot toes into the muck of the Carolina marsh, you’ll feel the hug of our loamy soil, a mix of sand, silt, and decaying plant material. Wading is not recommended due to the possible event of finding yourself mired in marshland goo known as pluff mud. Pluff mud is annoyingly ass-grabby, and like quicksand, can take you down.
If you tread too far into Low Country waters with shoes on, you may return home shoeless, having relinquished your shoes to escape the pluff. That can be a good decision, given the odds that there’s a leering gator grinning at you through the weedy marsh.
Yes, the crooked smile and shining white teeth may temporarily delude you, like a lawyer, into thinking that you’ve found a new friend. But opportunistic friends our gators be, so beware.
While the sun braises your skin, time first slows, then releases its grasp. Even trained monkey minds stop swimming, welcoming the buoyancy of brackish air. Peace descends, like grace, no need to send a formal request.
Maybe because it’s hot here, it’s easier to be fully present with nature.
Go ahead and scan the intercoastal waters, banked by rolling spans of seagrasses painting the panorama with earthy tones of ochre, sepia, Veridian, and celadon.
Here, grits feel like the sandy layer of our foundation. Food that echoes our landscape somehow makes us feel more rooted in our place, more at one with our planet, and more grounded in who we really are.
A Food with a Past
As we sup, we replenish ourselves with nutrients and a life force, flavorful stored energy bearing the imprint of its place and predecessors.
Grits, a southern staple in plantation pantries, bear a bit of gritty history.
“Shrimp and grits” has roots in Gullah cuisine that can be traced to Africa. If you’re in the Low Country area, it’s worth spending time learning about the Gullah history and culture and people known as Geechee in the islands of Georgia.
Over the years, “shrimps and hominy” has gone from a simple breakfast for enslaved people to a featured restaurant dinner entrée, at finer establishments even, bolstered with ingredients such as cream, country ham, kielbasa sausage, and sauteed onion, carrots, and celery.
What a Grit is and is Not
Grits are often overlooked and perhaps underrated, a supporting cast ingredient rather than a star. Like tofu, eggplant, rice, or crackers, a bowl of grits is an egoless Uber to transport other flavors, it possesses neither the need nor capacity to make a stretch-limo show of itself.
Let’s not apologize for instant grits and quick-cook white grits; they are indeed wallflowers. But if you desire to expand your sensibilities, consider grits made from stone-ground heirloom varieties of corn, including Bloody Butcher dent, made from burgundy or crimson corn, yellow Hickory King corn, or native coarse blue corn grits. These are the elegant, understated queens of the ballroom.
This seems the proper time to call out one masquerader at our ball: rice grits. Rice grits are like grits, but not. They are made from the middlins, or broken pieces, of rice, not corn. They are more akin to risotto than their marketed moniker may imply.
So how to make proper stone ground grits?
The main thing to remember about grits is the ratio. If you’re making stone ground grits, it is one part grits to four parts liquid. That liquid can be water, milk, stock, or a combination. Adjust your salt accordingly. I also throw a chunk of butter in for flavor, but you could always add that at the end.
Bring your grits to a hard boil, then simmer for 20–25 minutes or until the liquid is absorbed but the grits are creamy. You could then add other ingredients, i.e., bacon, shaved gouda, grated parmesan, or shredded cheddar. However, I purport that these grits are so stellar that they can stand alone.
Grit cooking isn’t all that tricky. But I’m going to share a hack that will make it even easier for you if you have a rice cooker.
If you don’t have a rice cooker, I can relate. For 58 years, I didn’t think I needed one; I believed that if I bought one, its fate would be waking up in a Ground Hog Day karmic trap of garage sales, like George Foreman Grills.
I’m a Rice Cooker Convert
I once was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I see how cool a rice cooker can be. I’ll share exactly why here in a minute.
For making grits, use your cooker’s white rice setting (50 minutes), then adjust the volume of liquid to a 5:1 ratio instead of the 4:1 that we used above.
My rice cooker takes 50 minutes to make the grits, then will dutifully keep them at the perfect temperature and consistency for hours longer. (Isn’t that a beautiful thing!) If you’re making breakfast, you’ll be busy with the coffee, bacon, and biscuits, but if you’re making shrimp and grits for dinner, go ahead and grab a beverage and stroll out to your screened porch or patio.
Cooking Grits in the Rice Cooker Gives You Time to Smell the Pluff Mud
This is the come-to-Jesus moment when you’ll realize that a rice cooker can be your new best friend.
Let the machine do the work. Then, enjoy the Low Country golden hour, where you can sit back in that rocker and observe the sun drop like a glowing New Year’s ball behind the lagoon.
In my patch of Low Country paradise, crane flies with their long legs, often mistaken for big daddy mosquitos, touchdown like snowflakes forming a random-patterned wallpaper on the screen walls. Screened-in is essential here; it is the difference between enjoying the backyard swamp and being a sampler platter for the swarms of winged nibblers that inhabit the area.
By mid-March, spring has begun its work of coloring between the lines, with branches sprouting blossoms, buds, and new greens. One bony tree remains on my skyline, its dead appendages grasping for the cotton candy overhead.
Cormorants chatter on the posts the dead poplar offers them alongside their familiar watering hole. A founding member of their water buzzard clan returns from his scouting activities and the flock choruses a greeting, “Nooooorm!”
Spring is not all butterflies, lilacs, and jasmine. Besides the pollen, there are stinky Bradford pear trees and the earthy smell of the pluff mud, a sulfuric aroma that indicates mother nature is doing her business.
A good vodka tonic in hand, or if you’re having a Sober Sunday, perhaps an effervescent Topo Chico, and you’ll find yourself listening to the trill buzz of the toads as they seek their mates for their spring fling thing.
The rice cooker beeps, a gentle last call for happy hour. You make your way back to the kitchen and pull out your fresh shrimp.
Shrimp and Grits
This is a dish where you can keep things very simple and appreciate the delicate flavor of fresh-from-the-sea shrimp and the unctuous lushness of your perfectly cooked grits.
Quickly sauté your peeled and deveined shrimp in butter and lemon until the shrimp turns pink. You could consider a little cayenne pepper, Old Bay seasoning, or garlic.
Now’s the time to taste-test your grits and add cheese and butter if desired. Don’t be surprised if they are so damn good, you decide they need nothing more.
Spoon a heap of grits into a bowl, then top them with a desirable mound of your shrimp. Finish with chopped spring onion. Be generous with the onion, it really makes the dish.
This is a hearty dish, but if you want to serve some kind of side, I suggest grilled corn, corn muffins, or a simple salad of tomatoes, cucumbers, and vinaigrette. Now dig in.
Grits have a “Special Something” to Offer
Grits are like a bottle of wine that drinks bigger than its price tag.
There’s a grits “x-factor” that’s elusive but definitively increases their buttery luster. Maybe it’s that they remind me of simple pleasures. Maybe it is their Low Country essence, a connection with a tactile and ethereal place, triggering presence and memory. Maybe it is how their subtle flavor makes them a comfortable companion, a thing that can be revisited again and again without getting old.
Perhaps it’s a little of all of the above.
Meanwhile, I’m happy when I find the stone ground heirloom varieties at some of the local farmer’s markets and will be keeping a bag in my freezer (recommended to keep them fresh). I can’t think of a better dish than “Shrimp and Grits” for providing friends and out-of-town guests with a taste of South Carolina’s Low County.