Binging with Babish: Grits from My Cousin Vinny

This episode is sponsored by Thrive Market. Thrive Market is an online membership-based market that works directly with your favorite organic brands to give you the highest quality products at the best price. Thrive Market will deliver everything from pantry essentials to sustainable meat and seafood right to your door. They even delivered the essentials we need to make the grits in today's episode. Join today by visiting thrivemarket.com slash BingingWithBabish and get 30% off your first order plus a free gift. The link is in the video description. Excuse me. You guys down here hear about the ongoing cholesterol problem in the country? Hey, what's up, guys? Welcome back to Binging With Babish, where this week we're finally taking a look at the grits from My Cousin Vinny, a southern breakfast, lunch, and dinner staple so essential it's used as evidence in a murder trial. Specifically, its extended cook time, at least 20 minutes. We're starting by constantly whisking two cups of boiling water as we add half a cup of hominy grits. This is gonna help prevent lumps from forming and then, as the movie prescribes, we're gonna cover and cook it for 20 minutes over low heat, stirring every five minutes or so to prevent scorching and seasoning to taste with kosher salt. Then the other essential ingredient in the movie iteration of this dish is lard. And since the cook was using it on a flat top, I'm assuming he was frying the bacon and eggs in it. So we're dolloping a much smaller but still unreasonable amount into a large carbon steel or cast iron skillet, effectively deep frying our bacon in it, which is gonna probably be awesome. Once the bacon's nearly done, cracking a couple eggs in there and cooking them over easy. That is, cooking them on one side until the edges are lightly crispy and the whites are mostly set, then flipping them over and cooking them for no more than 30 seconds, just to set any uncooked white and keep the yolks nice and runny. Find your very widest diner-style platter, plate up the eggs along with a big ol' pile of the grits, which, of course, we're gonna top with a couple tablespoons of butter. Blank that with some crispy bacon, and there you have it. The breakfast for my cousin Vinny, the healthiest fat of which might actually be the lard, which, despite Joe Pesci's protests, is actually a more nutritious cooking fat with less trans fat, saturated fat, and, ironically, damn near a third of the cholesterol of butter. That being said, he has a point. This is not exactly a light breakfast, but it is completely delicious, especially when all three elements are eaten together at the same time. But one type of grits does not a Babish episode make, so we gotta check out some of the other delicious and incrementally less healthy iterations of grits. First up, sweet grits, for which we're gonna use milk instead of water, which is inevitably going to boil over when you forget about it for five seconds. So go ahead and tidy up your big ol' mess, and you can pick up where you left off. You've scalded the milk, but it's not gonna ruin the grits. Same thing, whisk it in to prevent lumps, cover up, and cook slowly and gently for about 20 minutes. Then we're gonna season it to taste with kosher salt, extract our optional cinnamon stick that we added for flavor, pile it into a steaming bowl, and since it is a plain porridge, we need to load it up with all manner of wonderful, worldly toppings. Brown sugar, jams, nuts, drizzle of honey, and what the hell, another fist-sized pat of butter. And there you have it, sweet grits. Basically just oatmeal, but instead of oatmeal, uh, grits. And because this is basically just a bowl full of breakfast candy, it is obviously delicious, but the rich, cinnamony grits really act as a perfect backdrop for it all. But what about the decidedly more savory side of things, namely shrimp and grits? For this, we're gonna need a pound of fresh, peeled, and deveined shrimp. If you wanna see how to do this, click the link in the upper right-hand corner right now. And make sure to hang on to those shrimp shells, because we're gonna use them to make a quick shrimp stock. This time, our grits are getting the milk and chicken stock treatment, one cup of each. Go ahead and cover that up and bring it to a boil, and again, because there is milk in the pot, you can expect this to boil over when you look away from the pan for even one second. There it goes, just like clockwork. I'm kinda over it at this point, so I'm gonna add my grits first and then clean it up. And then, like any self-respecting southerner, cook these guys for about 20 minutes, seasoning with kosher salt to taste, and setting aside and keeping warm while we get our shrimp and other stuff ready. In a carbon steel or cast-iron skillet, we got four strips of bacon that we're gonna fry up, and in a nice, wide saucepan, we are toasting our shrimp shells for about one minute until they turn pink before adding one cup of water, two bay leaves, and a handful of whole peppercorns. Bring this up to a simmer while our bacon fries, and cooking down to about half its original volume. Extract the crispy bacon from the situation, and in the delicious bacon fat and fond, we're gonna briefly saute our shrimp about one minute on each side, sprinkling with about a tablespoon and a half of Creole seasoning before flipping. We're not trying to cook the shrimp through fully, we're just trying to get some nice color on both sides. They're gonna finish cooking in the sauce, so pull them out, set them aside. And in the even more delicious fond and bacon fat, we're gonna saute half a small chopped onion, half a small chopped green bell pepper, and the thinly sliced greens of two scallions. We're cooking these guys for three to five minutes over medium heat just to soften them up and give them some color, then squeezing in a clove of crushed garlic and letting that cook for about 30 seconds or until fragrant. Then we're finally deglazing the pan with our cup, cup and a half of homemade shrimp stock. Bring that up to a simmer and letting it cook down until it's reduced by about half, during which time we're gonna add about four ounces of shredded cheddar and three tablespoons of butter to our warm grits, stirring them in until melted but not fully incorporated, which is gonna give us nice streaks of cheese. Then we're adding our shrimp back to the pot, topping them with the juice of half a lemon and a few dashes of hot sauce, and letting them finish cooking through in the gravy. Then to serve up, we are laying down a foundation of our delicious, stretchy, cheesy grits, topping those generously with our shrimp and vegetables and what have you. Then before things get too healthy, we're gonna garnish with some of our crispy chopped bacon and a little bit of parsley. And there you have it, cheesy shrimp and grits, a southern classic that I can't wait to hear how I screwed up. Irregardless, it's totally delicious, not too expensive to make, pretty easy, and very wholesome. That being said, my blood does feel a little thick after eating all these grits and lard, so it's a good thing that the sponsor of today's episode is Thrive Market. Thrive Market makes it easy to shop, buy diets and lifestyles such as gluten-free, keto, vegan, and more. 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