Grits are junk food.....lots of butter....lots of cheese and anything is wonderful.
It's not about the grits....but about what you put with them!
Kind of like eggplant....not much by itself....but fry it in butter and it's wonderful....add garlic and OH MY! ! Layer it with marinara and cheese...better yet.
Wonder what egg plant with grits would be like...if you added enough garlic and cheese....I am sure it would be wonderful.

It does seem to be one of those controversial foods that inspire emotions! I have had them all my life in various forms and do like all grits, I live in SC and many restaurants have a grits dish. The diners and waffle houses have the basic white, nice restaurants usually an upscale grits entree with shrimp and tasso ham or something of that nature.
At the moment, I love the shrimp and grits at Cracker Barrel.

I never saw any good side to grits until I tasted Anson Mills traditional grits. They take forever to cook, but with nothing but salt and a blob of butter, are simply divine. I think most grits served in restaurants are instant and have the appeal of office paste.

Cheryl

I am a foreigner, and grits have absolutely no place in my culinary experience. But I was living in Houston when my DD was born almost 19 yrs ago. The breakfast I was served in the hospital the day after consisted of a bowl of grits, a can of Coke, and a cello-wrapped piece of toasted white bread. I couldn't get out of there fast enough!

OMG, cooksnsews, even my hospital breakfast after the birth of my first daughter was better than that, I was on a "soft" diet after a c-section and they brought me chocolate pudding and apricot juice. I thought it was the strangest combination ever, I still do. All I really wanted was a cup of tea and they wouldn't let me have that!

As for grits, I will not eat them. I ate far too much cornmeal mush when I was a child, it was the meal we ate when there was absolutely nothing else. Grandma would pour them into a loaf pan, then slice them and fry them. It was a small improvement but not much. Grits and polenta are both far too much like mush for me to eat them voluntarily, no matter how much butter or cheese or maple syrup or honey or shrimp or whatever. Under all the good stuff it's still mush.

Annie

I didn't like grits until we stayed at an inn somewhere in coastal Mississippi and they served a full breakfast.
I had grits with lots of butter and pepper and loved them, went back for more and had it with butter and gravy....loved them even more.
I tried instant grits once we got home and decided they need to be made in the South with lots of love and lots of butter.

Well, that is like saying I had a great cup of fresh roasted, freshly ground coffee then went home and had a cup of instant coffee and it wasn't good!
Good grits are stone ground and freshly milled.
They have a natural corn taste that is enhanced with butter, and although great gobs aren't necessary, they are good!
It's like a piece of toast, butter and jam do make it better.

I like grits the very first time I had it.

I like it the same way I like risotto.

Risotto is tasteless mush without other added stuff.

dcarch

I add lots of ingredients to grits when I make them, and my favorite way is with garlic, butter, Cajun seasoning, chilies, Italian sausage or breakfast sausage, and cheese. Egg also goes into the mixture before I bake it in a casserole dish, and it comes out something like a souffle. I also sometimes substitute it for cornbread when making turkey stuffing. I also like posole, but that is made with hominy instead of grits, but the flavor is similar. I've had very little experience eating plain grits with butter, but I do also like that also. As Annie said, grits and polenta are basically the same thing, and so if you do not like grits, you would not like polenta. I like both.

Lars

All I could think of is the hilarious scene from My Cousin Vinny with Marisa Tomei and Joe Pesci, where she whips out her little pink camera to capture Vinny, actually gonna eat, as in, "Are you actually gonna eat that grit?"

A friend brought me some stone ground grits from South Carolina last year, and I've made and had in restaurants upscale recipes made with either grits or cornmeal. Fancy polenta is simply what is locally known as cornmeal mush. Grits made with upscale recipes like shrimp and andouille sausage is so much like polenta that a novice would never know the differenct. I love them both.

I actually like polenta, go figure.

It seems that hominy is the lutefisk of the south. Take a perfectly good food and soak it in lye!! I will NEVER like lutefisk or try it again.

I love grits. Last night I couldn't decide what I wanted for dinner. I finally decided to have breakfast for dinner. I made me some cheesy grits with cheesy scrambled eggs on top. Okay, I o.d.'d on cheese, but it was the most enjoyable dinner I've had in a while. (I've been sick, and living on broth for a few days.)

I always make my grits with milk instead of water.

I love polenta too, but my family doesn't share my love, so I rarely make it.

Sally

As I understand it, southern grits are made from dent corn--it has a soft endosperm and makes great grits. On the other hand, polenta and other types of corn meal are made from flint corn.

Here's a posting from another site which is said to have originated at Anson Mills website, although I couldn't find it there just now:

"Dent or Flint?
Corn is classified by the type of starch (endosperm) in its kernels. The premier mill corn of the American South, known as dent (the name derives from the dent that forms on the top of each kernel as it dries), has a relatively soft, starchy center. Dent corn makes easy work of milling--it also makes phenomenal grits.

"Flint corn, by contrast, has a hard, starchy endosperm and produces grittier, more granular meal that offers an outstanding mouthfeel when cooked. One type of American flint--indigenous to the Northeast--was, and remains, the traditional choice for Johnny cakes.
In Italy, flint has been the preeminent polenta corn since the 16th century when Spanish and Portuguese treasure hunters brought Caribbean flint to the Piedmont on ships."

The first corn was taken to Italy in the hold of ships to hide gold and other treasures from pirates on the high seas. However there were famines and the people used it for food. Finding that they liked it, they began to cultivate it in Italy and another New World crop became part of Italian cuisine."

Be that as it may, both polenta and grits are cooked corn meal mush made from slightly different forms of corn. As far as the flavor of grits, it depends on both the freshness of the grits and the particle size. Good grits are larger and take a long time to cook; the smaller the particle size, the more quickly they cook and the more likely they are to taste like library paste. (Instant grits are an abomination.) But the most important part of the preparation has been mentioned by the late Lewis Grizzard, and that is to serve them 'with enough butter to choke a goat'.

arley - your post sounds like Anson Mills, and agrees with my own experience of both their grits and polenta. The grits have a softer feel in the mouth than their polenta. Both are quite granular and take around 4+ hours to cook in the slow cooker. Anson Mills cautions you to cook over very low heat to maintain the natural oils which give the grits their corny flavor. They taste like no other grits I've eaten. They grind their corn in small batches and keep frozen. We keep it in our freezer to avoid having the oils degrade.

The polenta is harder and full of corn flavor. I've made soft polenta and firm polenta which I slice and brown in a pan with butter. Divine!

Cheryl

I feel about grits like I feel about cream of wheat. I didn't like the stuff but when desperate for warm breakfast food at a camp I once worked at, I found out that with enough butter and brown sugar and some soft raisins and a splash of milk, it was almost edible. There is a fine line on both products, along with polenta and risotto, between excellent and library paste. There is something to be said for the quality of the beginning product and the skill of the preparer, along with the quality of the condiments. I eat and enjoy all the gruels, but find them inconsistent, sometimes they taste like the best thing going, the best of comfort food, and sometimes like inedible glop. Not sure if it is them or me or a combination of quality and circumstance.