Grits: A Neglected Fruit

About author / Josh Gunn

Bachelor chef; southern cooking; mixologist; university professor. Josh's recipes will delight (and sometimes terrify) you.

Professor Bachelor Chow--that would be me--or Dr. BC for short, is from the Deep South. After a brief stint living in the frozen Midwest, I now thankfully reside in central Texas (pronounced "Tey-Hass" by us slow-moving cooking types). Not the "south" proper in my book, but close enough.

Anyway, one thing I can get here that I couldn't find living in the tundra was grits. Grits! the neglected fruit of harmony, I mean hominy, served at southern diners and just-off-the-interstate Waffle Houses everywhere. Grits! the best late night snack after hitting the bars and seeing a really good band. Grits! that Quaker-Duded box in the back of the pantry that will sustain me when I cannot bring myself to navigate cell-phone-talking buggy drivers at the local grocery store.

(You know, aside from improper automobile lane changes and phone-chats at the restaurant dinner table, nothing annoys me more than grocery shoppers armed with cell phones. Who are these people? What's so damn important that you have to discuss it in the check-out line while writing a check for your groceries? These are the same people who talk on the phone in the john, I reckon. Curses on them all! May their phones fall in the toilet, or better, the urinal!)

Where was I? Oh, yes: grits! Now technically grits are not a fruit. Nope. They're made from hominy, which is dried corn soaked in lye-water until the hulls come off and the kernels puff up like them funny-looking fish. You know, Puffer Fish? Yeah, well, in lye-water dried corn puffs up like that, but without any fins or eyes or gills. And then you can eat the corn like that (you can buy it in a can, actually), or you can dry it out again and grind it up into a coarse grain. That grain is dried grits, and when you boil it in water again it makes a kind of polenta-looking porridge.

Now, you can buy what is called "instant grits," and to this you just tear open a packet, add hot water, and stir. Instant grits are fine in a pinch, but real grits are even better—and one company makes some "quick grits" that are both real and cook in a fourth of the usual cooking time of 30-40 minutes. To make them you basically follow the directions on the box depending on how many servings you desire: you boil some water, you add some salt, you dump in the grits and stir occasionally.

Unseasoned grits taste like the most boring baby food you can imagine, however, properly seasoned they are absolutely delicious. As the grits are cooking you can add stuff. Butter or one of those "Oh My Goodness This Can't Really Truly Be Butter, Can It?" spreads is a must, which melts and stirs right in. I like to add just a tad of sugar, which combines with the salt to give the grits a lovely, well, a lovely sweet and salty taste.

However, true connoisseurs of grits laud cheese grits. Dumping cheese into the grits just prior to serving makes 'em "cheese grits." Any kind of cheese works depending on your taste (I tried blue cheese once), but grit lovers typically go for cheddar. Once they're cooked, serve your grits up in a colorful bowl, perhaps garnish with a spring of oregano (which creates a nice, ironic contrast, of course).

If you've not had grits, you don't know what you're missing. I served some cheese grits to my West Coast girlfriend one morning despite her protests: she loved them and loved bragging to her never-heard-of-grits-before family about how much she loved them. I think they thought I was turning her into a hillbilly, but whatever. We're no longer together—probably because I am a hillbilly. But if anything could have saved our relationship, it was the grits.