You would be guessing correctly.
Cheese. Butter. Bacon.
drops mic, walks away
Corn meal mush is polenta.
Southern style sausage, cracklin’, country style ribs, pork butt, and fry it in lard - my husband thinks pork belly and bacon are gods gift to dining…
I think its all rather disgusting.
Sorta. They share a common ingredient.
Grits are ground hominy. Mush is cornmeal cooked in rapidly boiling water.
I’d never eaten them before, I only recently learned that Grits is Polenta.
I made some last night using that recipe you posted, with added bacon (chopped small and cooked in butter first) and substituted the Jalapenos for Habenaros.
Very tasty. Thanks for that.
Which is more like polenta, isn’t it?
This is what I don’t understand. I like grits. I like polenta. They taste quite different to me, so I don’t get the whole grits = polenta thing. Although the grits I’ve had are always hominy grits, so far as I know. Hominy, while made from corn, tastes quite different and has a different texture. I can easily understand someone liking one and not the other. What am I missing?
Polenta that you can buy in Aus is the closest thing. It works.
Quite different? At best, I’d say they taste very, very slightly different, and might have a different texture. There are so many different grinds, it’s easy to find polenta and grits that are ground to a similar size.
To me, most of the flavor difference comes from the differnet ingredients added. Polenta is often made with herbs, parmesian cheese, and chicken stock, which changes the flavor rather dramatically from the milk and water usually used in grits.
Well, “quite different” in the sense that cornmeal and masa harina are “quite different.” I personally find those two ingredients to be different enough not to be interchangeable.
Well, hominy grits and masa harina are different products, though. Masa is ground, then dried, while the opposite is true for grits. Plus, masa harina is ground very, very fine.
I find it to be more bitter, for some reason.
A lot (maybe most) of the artisinal grits produced by local mills in the South is not made from hominy. They’re just ground from dried corn.
ETA: Here’s a source for both.
I think you misunderstood my analogy. It was supposed to be more like polenta:hominy grits::corn meal:masa harina. Or you could even add corn:hominy to that. Products made from hominy vs corn taste very different to me.
I suspect this is the issue. As I said above, I think all grits I’ve had have been of the hominy type, so the constant comparison to polenta and insistence it’s the same thing is odd to me. It’s a bit like saying white rice and brown rice are the same, or that soup made with corn vs soup made with hominy are the same. I like both, but they are not quite interchangeable for me, and I understand liking one and not the other.
They aren’t exactly interchangeable items, no. I think the point people are trying to make is that they’re similar enough that it’s almost ridiculous to claim one is fantastic while the other is just terrible. The vast majority of people who like one will usually like the other, provided a similar level of quality between the two products.
On top of that, a lot of people who eat grits on a regular basis don’t really know or care too much about the difference between grits made from hominy and grits made from regular corn, leading me to believe that the suble flavor differences really don’t matter that much after you’ve added all the other ingredients.
Ah, I also tend to eat grits and polenta very plain.
:eek:
Like, cooked in water and served with salt?
Inspire by this thread, I had grits for breakfast this morning. I had some maple and bacon cheese I bought last week. It works real well when you chop some up and stir it into your grits.
Unlike Vinnie, I do not like my grits al dente. I think that may be an issue with the “I don’t like grits, I like polenta” crowd. IME, grits are served soupy, often with rather noticeable hard gritty bits (hence the name?) floating around. I make mine so each grit is softer, but the whole pot is much stiffer in texture, so the result is a bit more uniform. I generally avoid restaurant grits that are so loose they’ll run all over your plate.
I also just start my grits in cold, salted water, so I don’t have to worry about clumping. They seem to come out just fine, so I don’t know why all recipes demand that you sprinkle ever so carefully into boiling water. Am I doing something heretical and wrong?
I like mine with a bit of cheddar cheese, a tiny bit of cayenne, and fresh ground black pepper. And agreed, Bob’s Red Mill are very good, but (shhh) I often use Quaker Quick (not instant!) Grits when I’m feeling both cheap and lazy.
Grits, like good risotto, should slowly crawl when plated. It shouldn’t be a mound, nor should it run everywhere.
“What are those?”
“Hell, them’s grits, boy!”
“They’re moving, man.”
-George Carlin