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Fried green tomatoes went well: It's summer y'all. Snap beans, sauteed squash and onions, hoecake, fried green mater. Maters maybe could have used some kind of sauce? It was the best damned squash I've ever cooked, and I forgot how good fresh snap beans are just boiled in well salted water. I fried everything in a lard/bacon grease mix and I feel like it upped my frying game 100% vs oil. Everything was crunchy and crispy and brown and not at all greasy. Had some cute lil baby yellow and pattypan squash from the garden:  Browned onions in bacon grease, and then added squash. Kept it on very high heat to get color on the squash:  It probably would have been best at this point. I stuck it on the back of the stove while I did the green tomatoes and it steamed and got a little mushy, but still one of the best squash things I have ever cooked, especially for having 4 like ingredients. Hoecakes frying looking so pretty:  Martha white cornmeal mix, and then add roughly equal parts hot water and buttermilk to make a batter. So tasty.
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May 28, 2020 04:26
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Hoecakes are so good. I much prefer them over regular old pancakes. Crepes, I still like equally but pancakes are just so boring for as many calories are in them. Back to gritchat, I added too much pepper to mine today and now they suck. 
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May 28, 2020 15:48
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Croatoan posted:Hoecakes are so good. I much prefer them over regular old pancakes. Crepes, I still like equally but pancakes are just so boring for as many calories are in them. i love a good buttermilk pancake. but honestly, one, maybe two, max. i don't need a giant stack. as for grit issues, why not make more grits and add to them :V
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May 28, 2020 16:51
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mediaphage posted:i love a good buttermilk pancake. but honestly, one, maybe two, max. i don't need a giant stack. And a little cheese, for good measure
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May 28, 2020 17:00
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Biscuits and gravy development trip report. Landed on final* recipes after 22 batches of biscuits, 5 batches of sausage and 8 batches of gravy. Random thoughts/learnings: Buttermilk is indeed, absolutely king. We tried an early recipe without, and didn't love it, then tried our final buttermilk recipe with whole milk swapped in and some levener adjustments, and it was "fine", but I would only ever make it if I just straight up could not get my hands on buttermilk. We ended up using 100% tallow since we have a ton of it and it tasted great. Just about any fat can make a biscuit that is both recognizable as a biscuit, and tasty though. Butter is really the only one that takes special consideration as far as technique goes due to the water content. I even made a batch with unrefined coconut oil as the fat, and it was delicious. Terrible with sausage gravy, but I'll find a good use case for it at some point. Maybe strawberry "shortcake". Just about every sausage I have ever made, and every legit recipe I have ever seen, calls for ~10% liquid. This is the right call for cased sausages, and even for breakfast sausage you plan on slicing into patties and eating. It's the wrong call for sausage you specifically plan on crumbling and browning though. By the time all of the water is released and cooked off, all of the protein that came out with the water forms a layer on the bottom of the pan and burns before you get any brown on the actual sausage crumbles. This doesn't happen in a nonstick pan, but we only have 8" nonsticks for eggs, and need to make a massive batch in a 22" stainless rondeau. Normally, I would grind in some backfat or belly to get the fat content of the sausage up to 30%ish, but that would be kind of a pain in the rear end here. I ended up going with straight shoulder, which for crumbling works fine, it just doesn't leave enough grease on its own for roux making. This was a blessing in disguise, because I decided to try supplementing with a little bit of the apple/oak smoked tallow we still had lying around. It's loving incredible. The smoke flavor is pretty volatile, and there's not a TON of it in the gravy to begin with, so after cooking, the gravy didn't taste "smokey", so much as it was just a very pronounced savoriness that was night and day from the other batches. I have 40lbs of brisket trim in the smoker rendering right now to make sure we can keep doing this forever. I also highly recommend you plan on using a lot of black pepper in your gravy, but split it in half. I found a really positive difference when I bloomed half of the pepper in the sausage/beef fat before adding the flour for the roux. More detail below, but flour type is much less important than process and fat type. We ended up using Sir Galahad flour in our final recipe, even though it's technically a HIGH protein flour, which is anathema to conventional biscuit wisdom. It's the only flour that we normally use for other applications, so it was great to find that with the rest of my recipe done properly, it was indistinguishable from AP. *the only thing left to try on the biscuits is to use butter flavored popcorn salt, to see if getting butter flavor while using only tallow, works. I have low expectations, but maybe I'll be surprised. ThePopeOfFun posted:I'm going to try out a low protein flour like White Lilly. "Northern" biscuits don't taste the same, because most flour up here has higher protein. Probably worth your time. mediaphage posted:If you don’t overwork your dough you really don’t need to track down white lily. I use canadian AP flours (and also whole wheat, even), which are stronger than most US flours, to make my biscuits and they always turn out great. ThePopeOfFun posted:I'll have to try out the different flours. I'm pretty convinced a lower protein flour is going to make a difference, even after accounting for technique. Whether that difference is better or not dunno Mediaphage is right, but there is also a little more to it than just overworking. If you are using butter, which is usually 10-15% water, overworking is a major concern, and should be avoided at all costs. If you are using lard/tallow/shortening/any 100% fat and work it in well before adding buttermilk, it becomes much less of an issue. Our tallow is pretty soft, so it's super easy to really thoroughly coat all of the flour with it, which provides even more insurance against gluten development. After settling on final proportions, I did a large batch that I split into three smaller batches. First batch I made using the standard "mix until it's a shaggy dough, then gently pat it together into shape and cut". The second I purposefully mixed until it was a completely homogeneous dough, then rolled it out into shape. Third batch I straight up kneaded like a wet sourdough bread for a solid two minutes before forming. Batches 1 and 2 were nearly indistinguishable from each other. Batch 3 was definitely a little tough and dry, but honestly not too bad. This is great because in case of emergency, we can grab a line cook who has never made them before, follow the recipe with just "mix until dough comes together completely, but do not overwork." and still have a great product come out. ThePopeOfFun posted:I throw an acid in everything, and I'd throw it in gravy, too. Not enough to pick it out. You could do lemon, vinegar, buttermilk. I guess your biscuits could have it if you went with buttermilk. I just hate boring gravy. I am definitely familiar with the effect of acids, and their usual benefits. I pulled a half batch of gravy, and did side by sides against the control batch. I did increasing 0.02% increments of citric acid in sub batches. By the time we could even recognize a difference from the control at 0.08%, we didn't like it as much. By 0.1% we really didn't like it. We greatly preferred the only sourness to come from the buttermilk biscuits. If your cream gravy is boring, it's a problem with the amount of flavor is your sausage, or not enough pepper or salt, not a lack of sourness. With fresh garlic, garlic powder, fresh sage, dried sage, onion powder, red pepper flakes, cayenne, black pepper, salt, sugar and MSG, boring is NOT a word I would use to describe our final product. All in all, this has been a really fun recipe to develop. Biscuits and gravy has always held a pretty special place in my heart, so I tried to stick to a very traditional flavor profile, but really nail it.
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May 31, 2020 19:00
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Did you try ATK's method? You melt the butter, let it cool a minute, then pour into cold buttermilk. The butter turns into tiny bits of slush. The advantage is that you can get all-butter flavor without any risk of overworking it.
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May 31, 2020 21:42
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i like nice words
Did someone say fried chicken? 
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Jun 1, 2020 00:14
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Doom Rooster posted:Words This is beautiful. I'd read any of your test notes, any time.
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Jun 1, 2020 00:21
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Doom Rooster posted:Biscuits and gravy development trip report. This is all great dude, nice job. It's funny because it looks like we add basically almost the exact same stuff in the sausage gravy. I like that you settled on using a lot of black pepper in the gravy as I think it's wonderful, and like you I tend to add it twice. Do you actually bother making sausage, or do you just add a bunch of that to fresh pork as you cook it? Done right, I'm not convinced there's a real big difference when you're using it to make crumbles / gravy. In terms of biscuits, nice that you nailed it down. Have you tried using buttermilk powder? I haven't done a side-by-side, but I will say it still makes a good biscuit, and since I don't always have buttermilk right on hand, it's nice to have in the pantry. In that vein, you might consider also adding butter powder if you're looking for the butter flavour without the risk of water. Or I wonder if you could just clarify butter / use ghee, and add milk powder if you really needed more of the milk protein flavour. I tend to do the frozen butter add, which I find really keeps things from getting overworked, but it can be a pain and I dunno how easy it would be in a production environment.
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Jun 1, 2020 02:49
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To get the flakey biscuits I tend to laminate the dough in like 5 layers after I fold in the peas of butter
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Jun 1, 2020 06:13
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whatevz fucked around with this message at 03:08 on Apr 25, 2022 |
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Jun 17, 2020 04:40
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whatevz fucked around with this message at 03:08 on Apr 25, 2022 |
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Jun 17, 2020 04:58
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pleasecallmechrist posted:That Jiffy poo poo is northern corn muffins and is basically cake. It's delicious in a bowl with milk.but it doesn't count and ain't Southern lol
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Jun 17, 2020 05:05
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pleasecallmechrist posted:Alright y'all. Came a bit to the thread but I can effort post like a mofo on this one. Learned to cook from my TN and GA grandmother's. Still live round here. All my love to anyone who opens their table to others. Slight aside, but anybody interested in the south needs to check out Garden & Gun. I love it because it perfectly encapsulates the south to me - it's got a good appreciation of high & lowbrow southern culture, it's got a certain amount of tongue-in-cheek awareness of the poo poo that's nuts about the south, and it's willing to call out the things that need to change but it's also got a massive amount of straight presentation of stuff that's batshit insane but the editors don't necessarily seem to realize it. They had a writeup of bourbon that dug into the differences between Pappy Van Winkle and Weller that was built around a bourbon tasting organized by a local chef that involved roughly a dozen people drinking 24 bottles of bourbon over the course of about eight hours and then going out to get hosed up *afterwards*.
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Jun 17, 2020 21:21
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What are quick southern-ish meat/protein dishes that come to mind? I sear a ham steak real quick sometimes, but I'd love some more ideas for things to eat with my million vegetables. Snapbeans with onions and bacon grease, butterbeans, and a kind of lame smothered chicken breast tonight.
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Jun 30, 2020 02:28
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Kaiser Schnitzel posted:What are quick southern-ish meat/protein dishes that come to mind? Can make lots of stuff with a sausage. I think we should knock off the cornbread gatekeeping, there's very little more annoying, especially because we can break down cornbread along all sorts of lines, including class, region, and ethnicity. The biggest reason many traditional cornbreads never had sugar - aside from cost / availability questions - is a) because they used naturally sweeter cornmeal and b) they kept a bottle of molasses or syrup on the table to drizzle it in. really the end effect is the same. just like some people will make cornbread with 100% corn, some with whole wheat, some with white flour, etc. it doesn't have to be this big, monolithic concept.
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Jun 30, 2020 03:12
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Imo the way to get a quick dinner is to batch cook on the weekend (or whenever you have time). You can make a bunch of ribs, smothered pork chops, stewed chicken & rice, whatever, and then it's super fast to reheat alongside a vegetable.
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Jun 30, 2020 03:26
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Less quick but if you don't need it right away I'm a big fan of braising everything together in a pot. Very very little active effort so it can do it's thing. Lots of southernish stuff works great as a braise. Even if you can't portion out all your proteins ahead of time, doing some batches of stuff like a cooked down red sauce, a bowl of caramelized onions, etc., can make for complex meals quickly - just add a handful of this or that to your rice or potatoes, say. mediaphage fucked around with this message at 13:35 on Jun 30, 2020 |
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Jun 30, 2020 03:46
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Kaiser Schnitzel posted:What are quick southern-ish meat/protein dishes that come to mind? Generically, I'd say chicken-fried whatever you've got, pan-grilled pork or beef with veggies cooked in the grease, any meat stewed with greens are all pretty typical southern (not solely southern of course, but typical dinner food).
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Jun 30, 2020 15:18
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pleasecallmechrist posted:Just my opinions: Lol what
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Jun 30, 2020 20:03
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All Cornbread Is Delicious. We should celebrate our differences and not let them divide us! We must present a united front against the real enemy- people who call a Coke ‘pop’ and think mayonnaise is gross.
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Jul 1, 2020 00:45
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Hard agree, and besides it's not like regional food doesn't tack elsewhere over time. You can sub just about any cornbread variety for any other - sweet, cakey yellow is still delicious with a pot of beans and some collards - so at the end of the day people should eat the stuff they like to eat. I do advise everyone to try another way of doing it, though, as you never know what you might discover. I'll confess...I don't like mayo on things. Only in things. I might dip fries in aioli or tartar sauce.
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Jul 1, 2020 01:41
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Nth agree that food purist debates are just dick-waving, eat what tastes good to you. This is currently my go-to recipe for cornmeal, which the author presents as a kind of cornbread but to me is closer to a pupusa - it's skillet-fried cornmeal mush, and if you do it right it's a killer base for beans or greens. https://slate.com/culture/2014/07/hoecakes-recipe-and-history-how-the-southern-cornbread-got-its-name.html
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Jul 1, 2020 18:25
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mediaphage posted:Hard agree, and besides it's not like regional food doesn't tack elsewhere over time. You can sub just about any cornbread variety for any other - sweet, cakey yellow is still delicious with a pot of beans and some collards - so at the end of the day people should eat the stuff they like to eat. I do advise everyone to try another way of doing it, though, as you never know what you might discover. Making a batch of chicken and dressing with super sweet corn bread tastes really strange (I did it) but other than that agreed
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Jul 1, 2020 18:40
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whatevz fucked around with this message at 03:07 on Apr 25, 2022 |
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Jul 1, 2020 19:01
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Pickled squash recipes would be good too. Garden is just pumping out the 1st ones and looks like there'll be lots there.
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Jul 1, 2020 19:27
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pleasecallmechrist posted:I also have a metric poo poo ton of chili peppers so besides pickling them and making pepper vinegar, y'all have any ideas? This is more south Asian than the American South, but I love sambal in all its forms and I always make a jar when the garden comes in. If you google sambal recipe you'll get a million of them, but they all boil down to chili + aromatics + oil + umami sauce, and it's really up to you what variation and what amount you want for all of that. I usually go with a paste made from a handful of dried bird peppers, a few fresh garden peppers of whatever type, 2-3 cloves of raw garlic, some olive oil, and a splash of braggs and some rice vinegar and some salt all roughly chopped in a food processor. Other common recipes include frying onion and garlic first, using fish sauce or dried shrimp as well, adding sweeteners or coconut milk, and/or roasting the peppers. It's pretty mix-and-match, so experiment until you find what works for you personally. Then add it liberally to anything. See: https://www.chilipeppermadness.com/chili-pepper-recipes/sauces/sambal-oelek-recipe/; https://www.nyonyacooking.com/recipes/sambal-nasi-lemak~HkVJdwiPMcZ7
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Jul 1, 2020 19:43
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pleasecallmechrist posted:Shrimp in all its forms is quick. Filets of any fish. Grilled trout, crappie, catfish, blue gill. Switch the smothered chicken out for smothered pork chops. Broiled pork chops with broiled brussel sprouts is nice. My mom always used Dale's for pork chops so I'm under the impression that it is a Southern marinade. Salisbury steak is also quintessential. Smoked two whole chickens last night. If you haven't considered, you should totally do some lacto fermentation on those peppers if you're just doing vinegar quick pickles. Obviously a variety of hot sauces can arise: not really southern, but an easy fresh one you can do is peri peri; just needs a few hot peppers, onion, lemon, and salt (garlic + everything else delicious but optional). Do you have a smoker setup at all? Chiles do great smoked. Stuff them and fry (or don't), char and serve fresh with breakfast, lunch, or dinner.
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Jul 2, 2020 11:47
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If pork fat and dairy were vegan, I could totally do it.  Really needed some cornbread but I didn’t want to turn the oven on because it’s still 83 outside
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Aug 13, 2020 02:33
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Those peas look legit. Greens too. Hell it all looks good. And you know, this is something that a lot of people who only see the bbq and fried stuff don't understand - proper southern cookery is primarily a vegetable cuisine. I mean, meat and three, or whole meals made of beans and cornmeal, the presence of a million and a half days to stew tough leaves. I would love it if that part of the cuisine got more credit. Mr. Wiggles fucked around with this message at 03:36 on Aug 13, 2020 |
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Aug 13, 2020 03:33
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Earlier in this thread, someone stated that grits were "just polenta". This is untrue, though there are of course similarities between the dishes. The big difference is that the dish known as "grits" in the American south, historically and traditionally, is not made with corn grits but rather with hominy grits. In my view this is not just a piece of trivia to be pedantic about on the internet. Remember that southern cooking -- again, historically -- is more a cuisine of poverty and deprivation than of wealth and choice. Hominy, in case you're unfamiliar, is maize which has been processed by boiling in an alkalai solution. Commonly lime, but sometimes lye. This process was discovered by the Aztecs, and is known as nixtamalization because "nixtamal" is the Nahuatl word for hominy. And where southerners ground hominy to the fineness of grits and made a porridge, Mesoamericans ground it finer to produce something else you probably know and love: masa. So why would you do this to corn? Two big, useful reasons. One is: Wikipedia posted:...the alkalinity helps the dissolution of hemicellulose, the major glue-like component of the maize cell walls, and loosens the hulls from the kernels and softens the maize. Some of the corn oil is broken down into emulsifying agents (monoglycerides and diglycerides), while bonding of the maize proteins to each other is also facilitated. The divalent calcium in lime acts as a cross-linking agent for protein and polysaccharide acidic side chains.[3] As a result, while cornmeal made from untreated ground maize is unable by itself to form a dough on addition of water, the chemical changes in masa allow dough formation. quote:The nixtamalization process was very important in the early Mesoamerican diet, as unprocessed maize is deficient in free niacin. A population that depends on untreated maize as a staple food risks malnourishment and is more likely to develop deficiency diseases such as pellagra, niacin deficiency, or kwashiorkor, the absence of certain amino acids that maize is deficient in. Maize cooked with lime or other alkali provided niacin to Mesoamericans. Beans provided the otherwise missing amino acids required to balance maize for complete protein. Today, in the era of industrialized baking, where B vitamin complex is sprayed onto every wheat product, the average American isn't doesn't have to worry about niacin deficiency. But as someone who enjoys history and views food as probably the least lovely and most shareable thing about my southern cultural inheritance, I'm sad that not many people (even in the south) seem to know this.
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Aug 13, 2020 17:27
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mdxi posted:Earlier in this thread, someone stated that grits were "just polenta". This is untrue, though there are of course similarities between the dishes. The big difference is that the dish known as "grits" in the American south, historically and traditionally, is not made with corn grits but rather with hominy grits. In my view this is not just a piece of trivia to be pedantic about on the internet. Remember that southern cooking -- again, historically -- is more a cuisine of poverty and deprivation than of wealth and choice. you are correct, though i find the tone of this post weird regardless most places i see serving grits today (and in my family growing up) hominy grits is held as a dish distinct from standard grits regardless of what they are historically. i imagine today it's probably regional as to whether you're getting hominy grits or cornmeal grits when you order.
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Aug 13, 2020 18:22
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Dinner tonight was chicken-fried chicken, fried pickled okra with some whole garlic cloves thrown in for variety, and rice with nuoc cham. I was out of milk so no cream gravy this time around, but some local hot sauce worked just fine. Despite the weird cut, the chicken is just one breast, halved. Oil was a little hot and I was using a pan so some spots came out dark, but it was still great. God, I love okra. I pickled some the other week and it is excellent straight out of the jar too.
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Aug 15, 2020 16:23
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Dinner tonight: Collard greens and field peas/succotash. 
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Aug 17, 2020 01:00
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Safety Factor posted:
I am so pissed at myself - I've lost about half my garden yield this year by waiting too long so they got woody and inedible. I kept thinking "nah, that's too small and I'll give it a day" and then they're too big.
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Aug 18, 2020 18:25
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Kaiser Schnitzel posted:If pork fat and dairy were vegan, I could totally do it. I’ve been eating this same pot of peas and pot of greens for 8 days now with some cornbread and hoecakes and it’s literally the best $8 I have ever spent.
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Aug 21, 2020 02:53
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Noob at baking here, how critical is Crisco for biscuits? I have easy access to butter and lard but getting Crisco would involve an out of the way trip to a specialty store. I see it all the time in biscuit recipes and my attempts at making biscuits never come out quite right. Although we do have issues with our crappy oven compounding things
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Aug 31, 2020 01:29
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Xun posted:Noob at baking here, how critical is Crisco for biscuits? I have easy access to butter and lard but getting Crisco would involve an out of the way trip to a specialty store. I see it all the time in biscuit recipes and my attempts at making biscuits never come out quite right. Although we do have issues with our crappy oven compounding things It’s not. You can use butter or lard in its place.
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Aug 31, 2020 01:53
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Xun posted:Noob at baking here, how critical is Crisco for biscuits? I have easy access to butter and lard but getting Crisco would involve an out of the way trip to a specialty store. Crisco was basically the 1960s substitute for lard, so you should be good to go. For some more details: https://sweets.seriouseats.com/2010/05/how-to-make-a-flaky-pie-crust-recipe.html
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Aug 31, 2020 02:52
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I used to just use crisco, now I use crisco, butter, and lard In about equal parts. I’ve done all lard and all butter, but I prefer all lard to all butter. Butter makes tougher biscuits or something in my experience. They’re not bad, they’re just not melt in your mouth tender southern biscuits.
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Aug 31, 2020 04:22
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