[Homestead] Grits-Polenta, OMG I am confused!<g>
Marie Mcharry
mmcharry at gmail.com
Sun Oct 17 18:41:14 EDT 2010
I've had grits, cornmeal, and polenta. Grits are white and made from hominy. Cornmeal is usually yellow unless made from white corn; it's corn kernels ground to various degrees of fineness. Polenta is fine-ground cornmeal.
And then there's masa, which is used for tortillas. It's made from lime-treated corn kernels that are then ground. I'm not clear how it differs from grits except that it's finer ground. I buy mine from Wally World, so I don't know about making it. I think James explained the process here a couple of years ago.
This is all I know on the issue. Regarding the yellow grits: check to see if lime is an ingredient. If not, what you have is cornmeal.
On Oct 17, 2010, at 1:43 PM, EarthNSky <erthnsky at gmail.com> wrote:
E
> Okay, we are part of the 'grit-eating' world, and have never eaten or tasted polenta, per se. It was always my understanding that grits are made from hominy which is made from soaking corn kernels in lye. The hominy is then dried and ground, voila, grits. Polenta, I thought, was more akin to corn meal, just a course ground meal. In Dixie, cornmeal is used in frying, and in making cornbread, which I have always thought would be closer to what polenta would be like than grits.
> Now mind you, I grew up eating Quaker instant grits-blasphemy, I know, to some, but common enough for you to know what that is. Now, we mostly use the long cook version, still Quaker, but we like the course ground, long cook grits. I eat grits with butter and sometimes cheese or sausage or bacon. I don't put eggs in them the way dh does, nor ham, nor onions, nor sugar nor milk, nor anything else that I have ever heard of using to flavor grits. I think I am rather simplistic in my grits preferences, but I should also include that I have eaten leftover fried grits and a cheese grit casserole with fried fish.
>
> So here we are in Kroger yesterday (I rarely shop at Kroger anymore, but wanted some organic cherry juice that only they carry) and dh puts a bag of Quaker "yellow corn grits" in the buggy. We later had a discussion about the difference and I told him what I knew about so called hominy grits, and that the lye removed the color, I thought. He went to the web for answers. He looked at Wikipedia? and found a page that suggested that the only difference between yellow grits and white grits was the color of the corn kernel. He found something else that likened the process to the difference between brown rice and white rice, equating yellow grits with brown rice-degerminated. So is this degerming process the whole lye to hominy stage? Have we just dropped the word hominy from hominy grits and just call them grits, or are grits and hominy grits separate things still? Are Quaker instant grits really instant hominy grits? Are Quaker long cook grits really hominy grits since they are white and degermed, even though it
More information about the Homestead
mailing list