Sunday, January 15, 2012

All About Southern Cooking

When it comes to southern cooking, not only is it fun but the food is sublime. Food cooked through the southern method comes with a mix of influences from the Irish to the French and even the African Americans. Several examples of this form of cooking include Creole a mix between Florida and the Caribbean.

For their style of cooking, you can really see how culture plays an important role in southern locations like Delaware, Maryland, Ohio River, and Oklahoma. In such places, the people simply love food choices such as grits and corn. American Indians back in the day used to prepare their food through pit roasting and the practice continued to the day and these days, one kind of southern cooking involves the use of a deep pit barbecue.

From flour to sugar, baking ingredients are popular in the south as well. This is something that came about thanks to Europe. When it comes to meals, breakfast is the most popular meal in the south and everything from large quantities of breads to cheese are served.

Bread and chicken are staples in southerners' regular meals and collard greens plus grits add to the whole experience. Expect also to see a piece of pie or a cobbler on the side for dessert. A number of traditional American soups, such as chicken noodle soup, lentil, and even split pea, actually originated from the South.

Most of the time, southerners make and eat pies with pecan or apple fillings while the vegetables that they love include everything from okra to squash. Breads may be in the form of rolls, cornbread or biscuits, while the salad is either a fruit salad or garden salad. Southern folk will not allow anyone to eat on a messy table as having the proper settings make food taste more delicious.

Southerners cannot live without corn bread. It will not be a meal without corn bread and so you can always expect free flowing bread in southern kitchens. If there are no biscuits, corn bread, or rolls, you are not eating a southern meal.

If you plan on making corn bread, you need ingredients like flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt to start you off. Then, egg, milk (buttermilk) and liquid shortening are added. It is okay to mix in some sugar if you like.

The ingredients include 1 ½ cups of self-rising flour, 2 eggs, 1 cup of buttermilk, liquid shortening (olive oil), all-purpose flour, a tablespoon of liquid shortening (oil for the skillet), and ¼ cup of sugar, if desired. Mix the ingredients well. Use muffin tins that have been greased when you bake the bread.

Southern cornbread is distinctly hot when served, as are southern biscuits. They normally set oven temperatures beyond 400 degrees. Aside from not using plain old flour in their corn bread, southerners also use cornmeal when the dough is placed on the skillet for cooking.

When it comes to the dough, it is important for the dough to be as thin as possible. Southern cooking has many secrets and this is one of them. There are other southern techniques in making apple pie, buttermilk biscuits, green salad, squash casserole and other southern kitchen staples.

Are you interested to learn more about southern cooking? If so, hitting the link will help a lot.