One of the true staples of North Carolina, and the south in general, is the deceptively simple dish of shrimp and grits. If you go to almost any respectable Southern restaurant for a Sunday brunch, I guarantee that shrimp and grits will be on the menu. Of course, like so many great dishes, every restaurant makes their version of shrimp and grits differently and they all have their own way to make their dishes unique.
And so, last night, I decided to enter the world of shrimp and grits and make my own spin on the classic dish. I call it, creatively enough, Temple's Shrimp and Grits, version 1.0, which allows for me to make improvements upon the dish in the future until I have created what I consider to be the best possible version. Because people tend to want to put their own unique spin on the dish, I decided to make a brown butter sauce for it. For those of you who have never made a brown butter sauce, I'm sorry. To me, it's one of the greatest and simplest sauces you can make and browning the butter creates an incredibly complex yet delicious combination of flavors.
To be honest, I didn't really have much of a plan as I started making this dish. Instead, I sort of grabbed what I had in the fridge and went with it. This meal really required multiple things to be cooked at the same time but for the sake of simplicity, I'm going to run through one dish at a time and then show you what it all looked like when combined.
I'll start with the brown butter sauce. To make this, I took a stick of butter and melted it in a stainless steel pan (which I mainly use because it's easiest to see the color of the butter as it cooks). To this, I added some thyme for a little extra flavor:
This cooks on fairly low heat for a while and I stir it often to keep it evenly heated. Here we are after a few minutes:
After about 15 minutes or so, the butter turns a wonderful shade of brown, as you can see here. You have to be careful at this stage because it really doesn't take much to go from browned to burnt, so once you see this color, it's best to remove it from the heat:
Once I removed it from the heat, I strained it and put it in a glass measuring cup. I'll pour this over the final dish as you'll see:
In the big pan, I start with (what else?!) bacon.
I fry the bacon until it's really nice and crisp, then remove it and set the bacon aside:
Into the bacon grease, I add a diced onion and a ton of garlic and saute this until it's nice and fragrant, about 5 minutes:
About midway through, I added some parsley:
Then once the onions, garlic, and parsley were looking good, I added the shrimp:
After just a few minutes of cooking, here is what the shrimp mixture looked like:
Finally, in my 3rd pot, I had the grits going. The particular grits I went with were made from the whole kernel, which is why they are yellow rather than white. I honestly don't know enough about grits to know whether there is a clear taste distinction between white and yellow grits. I mainly went with these because they looked the best at the store and were about the only non-instant option out there:
Once the grits were about cooked, I added some shredded cheddar cheese as well as about a cup or so of chicken broth. I have a feeling that cooking grits in things other than water will really add to the flavor of the dish in the same way cooking risotto in broth does. I was a little nervous to start out my first attempt at the dish by cooking them entirely in a broth, but I did add it in to hopefully add some more flavor.
Here's a shot of everything going at once. We've got the butter in the back left, the grits in the front left, and the shrimp going on the front right.
Once everything was done, it was time to bring it all together. I put a nice helping of grits on the plate, then topped that with the shrimp mixture and the bacon. I then drizzled the brown butter sauce on top and here you go, Temple's Shrimp and Grits version 1.0:
I have to say, these were really good. The grits were creamy and flavorful, the shrimp were delicious, and the brown butter sauce added some interesting flavors that I think worked really well with everything else. Of course, this is only the first version and I have many ideas for the next. For one, I think there are a lot of other items that would go well with the shrimp mixture, such as mushrooms and green onions. I also want to experiment more with different varieties of grits and cooking them differently. For now, though, I think this dish is already a winner.
Happy eating!
