Cook Your Grits in a Golden Corn Stock

Portland, Oregon—the city in which I reside—is obsessed with Southern food. I mean, I get it. Southern food is good, but a lot of the restaurateurs who prepare it have a hard time resisting the urge to “elevate” it, which misses the point of the cuisine entirely. (I once found a whole sprig of rosemary in my sausage gravy, if you can believe it.)

Most Southern cuisine is optimized already: designed to taste good without the need for expensive ingredients. So imagine my surprise when I found myself simmering grits in various stocks, trying to make them “better.” The whole point of grits is that they taste like corn, and simmering them in ham stock (a good stock) was obscuring the corn flavor, which was frankly disrespectful to grits, my family and myself.

How to Cook Grits in Your Instant Pot Read More

But then I remembered corn cob stock—that golden stock made from spent cobs. It’s always made a nice vegetarian ramen broth base, but I think making corn grits even cornier is its truest, highest calling, for there is no such thing as “too much” corn flavor. (You’re not “elevating” the grits, you’re honoring them by extracting as much flavor as you can from the bones of their ancestors.) The recipe for corn cob stock can be found here, but it’s really just a matter of simmering (or pressure cooking) kernel-less cobs until the water takes on a nice golden hue, then straining out the cobs.

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Then, simply cook your grits however you usually cook them—I’ve been cooking mine in the Instant Pot—substituting water with cob stock. I wouldn’t call them “elevated,” because that word sucks. But I would refer to grits cooked in a stock made from corn bones as “intensified” (and then I would smother them in cheese).