True Grits

Sure I've heard of grits.

I just never actually seen a grit before.

~Joe Pesci in My Cousin Vinny, one of Sir's all-time favorite flicks

As the Diva and I enjoyed our boffo brunch on Sunday, the subject of food came up in conversation as it almost inevitably does. She wondered what we were doing a chez Fractured Amy for side dishes these days, and I was forced to confess that in the area of starches we are somewhat limited, relying mainly on potatoes and rice. Gluten-free pasta, of course, is nothing but heartbreak. Quinoa has been off the menu ever since I was alerted to the dire effects its international marketing is having on the good people of Bolivia. I am having trouble getting behind such earthy-crunchy grains as buckwheat and amaranth. The boys despise beans of all kinds and although Sir will eat a lentil if it's concealed in a spicy dahl, the Kid Squid wouldn't touch one with a pair of eighteen-inch grilling tongs. Chickpeas are acceptable to all, but consuming them in side-dish-sized quantities is something one only does at extreme peril to one's digestive well-being.

Recently, though, I have been turning to maize products with great success - most notably in my untangling of the samp mystery and the invention of my newest protein-rich dish, South African Style Hominy and Beans (which, sadly, the boys dislike intensely). Maize meal also appeared on my radar recently when I mistakenly thought Floyd used it as the centerpiece for this Top Chef Master-worthy dish of upma with mushrooms - and although it turned out his upma was made from semolina, it still got me to thinking.

I currently use organic yellow cornmeal in various delicious applications such as corn bread, hasty pudding and hoecakes, but I had to ask myself why I haven't yet tried that traditional all-American down-home side-dish of gluten-free champions, grits?

Determined to redress this deficit ASAP, I popped into the supermarket on my way home only to be immediately brought up short by the realization that grits, like so many other things in my life at present, are complicated.

I found two different varieties. The first, from Bob and His Red Mill, I located in the organic/health food/bleeding-heart liberal aisle. They were called Organic Corn Grits and through the clear bag I observed their rough texture (like coarse sand) and bright yellow hue. I noted from the label that the contents were low in fat, reasonably high in fiber, protein-bearing and packed with iron. I also saw that they require refrigeration after they've been opened: I discovered later that such ground corn retains its oily germ and starchy endosperm. While this wholesomeness is what accounts for the grits' awesome nutritional value, it also causes them to spoil quickly if not kept cool. No problem - there's plenty of room left in the chill chest ever since the great February Fridge Purge.

The second breed of grits I found in the breakfast cereal aisle. The tubular blue-striped packaging sported a rather smug-looking eighteenth-century religious non-conformist of the pacifistical persuasion, and the label declared the contents to be Old-Fashioned Smooth and Creamy Enriched White Hominy Grits. I found it interesting that old-fashioned Friends understood the importance of niacin, thiamin, riboflavin, and folic acid, and reasoned that they had to add these substances in order to gain any sort of nutritional benefit whatsoever from their degerminated product. When I got the grits home I discovered that these too had a rough texture but were snowy white in color, just like my nixtamilized hominy.

Trivia alert: did you know that if you eat hominy slaked with lime or lye you will never get pellagra? FYI!

Anyway. I decided to cook up the yellow variety for the evening meal, because I thought it would provide a pleasingly colorful counterbalance to the rather beige plate of grilled pork and cauliflower I had planned.

I consulted a number of culinary references and concluded that my grits should be cooked in liquid at a ratio of around 1:3. I brought three cups of salted water to the boil (I'm low on stock, at present, and will not be making more until the Fall), sprinkled in one cup of grits (stirring all the while), and let them bubble quietly for fifteen minutes, giving them the occasional scrape 'n stir with my best wooden spoon. When they were good and thick and soft and clapped the lid on the pan and let them sit for five more minutes. At the end of that time I removed the lid and peeked expectantly into my pan to see what my efforts had wrought.

What they had wrought was an extremely polenta-like substance. So polenta-like, in fact, that I was moved to add a blob of butter; some fresh grated parmesan cheese; a few grinds of black pepper; and some sage leaves from the garden. My Southern-Style Pork Loin with Cauliflower and Creamy Grits became Carne di Maiale al'Italiano con Cavolfiore e Polenta Cremosa - a fine dish to be sure, but not what I'd originally had in mind.

I thought it was awesome but the boys were adamant: no matter what the name, they hated the dish. Hated ... the ... dish. Neither of them seems able to embrace maize the way he should, I'm afraid: Sir blames his English upbringing ('It's not in my culture, you know!') and the Kid Squid - well, the Kid Squid has a thing about texture and that's all I feel able to say on the matter.

*sigh*

I guess it's back to potatoes and rice.

Coming soon: True Grits, Take Two. I brown bag white hominy grits to work for a fine microwaved lunch and eat them all by myself.

Composition and Hominy

Loyal readers will no doubt recall the circumstances of the Great South African Samp Scare, when I feared I had eaten an entire bowl of gluten accidentally (as opposed to eating an entire plateful on purpose, which is a catastrophe of a completely different sort).

Later that fateful day, frenzied internet research revealed that the samp accompanying my beef curry and beans was the same thing as cracked hominy and I retired for the night secure in the knowledge that my status as a gluten-freedom fighter extraordinaire (to that point, anyway) remained unsullied.

This past weekend, motivated by the possibilities of a whole new side-dish species, I selected a pound-bag of white hominy (known to the good folks at Goya as Maiz Trillado Blanco) from the exotic foreign foods aisle at Wegmans. As is my wont, I read the label with scrupulous care and found that the nutritional story was mixed. Of fat (grasa), cholesterol (colesterol); and sodium (sodio) there was nada - but neither was there any substantial benefit in the way of vitamins or minerals such as calcium. But - to my great felicidad - I found that a mere quarter-cup of cracked corn goodness yielded a full 56% of my USDA recommended daily intake of hierro - dire lack of which had served as my current conflict's opening salvo.

I bought two bags and hurried them to my casa.

Needing some inspiration for this new addition to my pantry, I happily perused my most-recent dead-tree purchase, South Africa Eats by Phillippa Cheifitz, obtained at one of Tambo International Airport's finer newsagents. While reading the recipe for Slow-Cooked Beef with Herbed Samp, I made the following somewhat vague yet unwelcome discovery:

Samp is stamped and coarsely broken dried corn kernels
similar to the coarse hominy of America,

but the two are produced by different processes.

Oh, for crying out loud.

Back to the internet I went!

According to Wikipedia, samp is 'a protocol used to encode role-based and user-based access control attributes for transmission over a network, typically embedded in a TCP/IP or UDP/IP packet, with an application layer payload trailing afterwards.'

Um ... that doesn't seem right ... Here's a better web definition:

Samp is dried corn kernels that have been stamped

and chopped until broken, but not as fine as Mielie-meal or mielie rice.

The coating around the kernel loosens and is removed

during the pounding and stamping process.

From The Serengeti Restaurant in sunny Murrays Bay, New Zealand (of all places) I learned that

samp is boiled up with beans and other vegetables and is known as gnush.

A traditional dish enjoyed by the Xhosa tribe in the Transkei and Eastern Cape
(Nelson Mandela's home!) of South Africa and also
enjoyed in Swaziland (known as umngqusho).

I already knew that last part.

Seemed straightforward enough. But how was that different from the hominy I'd purchased only hours before?

Well, it turns out that both samp and hominy are made from de-hulled corn kernels, but that traditional hominy undergoes nixtamalization with an alkali solution - indeed, the masa used to make tamales is merely hominy ground to a fine mash. What is kind of fascinating is that samp turns out to be a Native American word (probably of Narragansett origin), adopted by early New England interlopers to mean corn cereal. Both the word and the grain somehow made its way to Africa (like peanuts and cheeseburgers), where it quickly became a dietary staple (ditto).

Isn't that cool? It makes me want to become a culinary anthropologist when I grow up so I could study this sort of stuff all day.

At any rate, I cooked up my corn sort-of-how I remembered it and came up with an awesome dish that I served under poached salmon to rave reviews. Whatever you choose to call it, it's really really good.

And it might even make you magnetica.

Fractured Amy's South-African Style Hominy with Beans

Rinse about 8 oz cracked hominy (or samp if you can get it) and cover it with cold water to soak overnight.

The next day, put the grain in a saucepan and add water or vegetable stock to cover. I used a mixture of both because I didn't have enough leftover stock in the fridge. Bring to a boil and simmer for about 40 minutes or until it's tender.

Meanwhile, rinse and drain about 6 oz of canned beans. I used Great Northerns that I found in the pantry, but cannellini beans or any other smallish white bean would be appropriate.

To the beans, add:

• a bunch of spring onions, sliced thin.
• 6 peppadews®, chopped. Any mild/sweet bottled pepper would do, I suppose, but then your dish wouldn't be authentically South African.
• a handful of flat-leaf parsley, chopped. I used some from my garden - the first harvest of the season!
• the grated zest of one orange, plus a few squirts of the juice.

When the hominy/samp is cooked, drain it and add it to the bean mixture. Check for seasoning (I added several grinds of black pepper and a bit of salt, too) and accompany with your favorite protein. I served the dish warm, but it would also be nice at room temperature as a summer salad.

Game for Gluten

After a long morning's game drive, during which we saw many things ...

... I was happy to belly up to an excellent lunch of beef curry, samp, and beans. Not wanting to be rude to my hosts, I gobbled up the proffered side-dish, ignorant of both its origin and constitution. Better known as mngqusho (not a hugely helpful description, I'm sure most Pennsylvanians would agree), my samp was undeniably exotic but horrifyingly grain-like. I was terrified that I'd ingested whole spoonfuls of gluten!

Fearing the worst, I raced to the internet as soon as the day's excitement was over and discovered, to my great delight and relief, that samp is the same thing as cracked hominy - again, an ingredient with which I am not over-familiar, but am confident is made from corn, like putu or mealies.

That makes me four-for-four gluten-free days and counting!

I might not need my Kind cranberry and almond bars (all natural! certified gluten-free! dairy-free! loaded with anti-oxidants! doesn't taste like packing material!) after all.