South Carolina · Main
Charleston Shrimp and Grits
- Intermediate
- 60 min
- roughly 3 of 4 for cost
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, acid holding everything up to the light, opening aromatic and staying there.
Ingredients
- 300g stone-ground grits
- 1L water
- 250ml milk
- 55g butter
- 150g sharp cheddar, grated
- 600g shrimp, peeled
- 150g bacon, diced
- 1 onion, diced
- 2 garlic cloves, minced
- 250ml chicken stock
- 1 tbsp lemon juice
- 2 tbsp parsley, hot sauce, salt, and pepper
Equipment
Grater / zester
The skills inside
Deglazing & pan saucesRendering fat: and cooking in what runs out
Allergen screen
Found: dairy · shellfish
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Simmer the grits in the water and milk 40-50 min, stirring often, until creamy. Beat in the butter and cheddar and keep warm. 50 min
- Render the bacon until crisp; lift out and reserve, leaving the fat.
- Cook the onion and garlic in the bacon fat until soft, add the shrimp, and cook 2 min a side until just pink. 2 min
- Add the stock and lemon and simmer 2 min into a light pan sauce. 2 min
- Season, fold in the bacon and parsley, and spoon over the grits.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Deglazing & pan sauces 49 recipes
- The pan still holds its fond. Nothing has been rinsed, wiped, or soaked, and the browned layer is intact on the floor.
- Excess fat was poured off first and the browned layer left behind; the fat is not the flavour and a sauce carrying all of it will not come together.
- The liquid went into a still-hot pan and the floor came clean: scraped while it bubbles, the base goes from stuck brown to bare metal and the sauce darkens as it takes it up.
- The fond was brown and not black. A burnt floor dissolves into bitterness that cannot be seasoned out, and is better washed away than deglazed.
- Reduced first and seasoned afterwards, tasted at the consistency it will be served at rather than at the start.
Where it goes wrong The pan was left to stand and go cold before anybody came back to it. Cold fond will not dissolve, so the scraping lifts nothing, and the sauce arrives thin and pale with the flavour it was supposed to carry still welded to the metal.
Rendering fat: and cooking in what runs out 73 recipes
- It started cold or low and came up slowly: fat that met a hot pan seizes and scorches before the inside can melt, and there is no recovering it.
- The fat in the pan is clear and clean-smelling, pale to golden, with no dark sediment on the floor and nothing acrid in the steam.
- What is left behind is crisp and deep gold with no soft pale fat still clinging to it and no black burnt edges.
- There is a real volume of it: enough to film the pan floor and be poured off and kept, not a dry smear that never ran.
- Whatever cooks in it browns in it and takes its flavour, rather than sitting in a greasy pool that never gets hot enough to colour anything.
Where it goes wrong The heat was raised to hurry it along, so the outside seized and browned before the interior fat could melt; very little runs out, and the solids come out burnt on the outside and rubbery within.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Barrel-aged Chardonnay (Meursault style)
- Also Right
- Champagne
- From the Taps
- Pilsner or witbier
- Zero-Proof
- White grape & tonic
Butter-dressed shellfish climbs a weight class: oak-and-cream Chardonnay matches it richness for richness.
Saved on this device and kept across visits: export from My Menu to move them.