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  • From: Marie Mcharry <mmcharry AT gmail.com>
  • To: "homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org" <homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] Grits-Polenta, OMG I am confused!<g>
  • Date: Sun, 17 Oct 2010 17:41:14 -0500

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




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