Conference turris::cooks

    I believe that hominy grits is made from dried, ground hominy.  I'm
    pretty sure that you can find canned hominy in the Spanish food section
    of the grocery store.  Hominy is simply corn soaked in lye (I think) to
    preserve it.  The corn swells like crazy when treated this way.

    You can usually find it in the canned foods section of your local
    grocery.  Hominy is actually corn that has been, humm, shall we say
    processed.  Kinda bland by itself, but works quite well when mixed with
    other things, especially spicy ones. 
    
    Ken
    For the not so brave, hit next unseen now. Explanation of "processed"
    follows.
    
    
    Ok, so maybe it isn't soo bad, but I've had a lot of friends get turned
    off when I tell them what hominy is.
    
    Basically, you take dried corn kernels, that have the hulls removed,
    and you soak them in a solution of sodium hydroxide, lye.  This causes
    a breakdown of the starch(?) as well as a general swelling up of the
    kernels.  After that they are rinsed and packed.  Now I could be wrong,
    but this is what I was told many years ago.

    Humm, notes collision...
    
    	Ken

Sounds like posole.  Some friends from the southwest turned me on to posole,
and gave me the ingredients to make a batch.  The main ingredient was a bag
of stuff labeled "Posole", and under that it said "Hominy".  It's corn treated
with lye or somw such.  The kernels are very white, and swollen enough to look
almost like a chick pea.  The way they cooked it was to stew it with chilies and
a few other ingredients.  Theirs was spicy, but you could make it mild, too.
The texture depends on how long you cook it.  Posole is cooked until the 
kernels "explode" (not with a bang, but they look that way).  Even with the 
long cooking time, they are still firm enough to be like a boiled potato.

Re processing with lye (sodium hydroxide), I'm told by a fellow
employee who used to be a chemist in a chocolate factory that the dark
color of chocolate is from processing with sodium hydroxide (maybe the
origin of the name of Hydrox cookies, hmmm?).

Just 'cause you wouldn't want to eat Drano doesn't mean it can't be
used to make some tasty foods. I worry that some of the other stuff
that goes on in food processing plants is even worse ... a meat packing
plant sounds tame (and at least more "natural").

    It seems that I've answered my own question... in a bookstore
    last nite James McNair's _Corn Cookbook_ caught my eye (he seems to
    have a whole series of little books on cuisine.)

    Sure enough he mentions posole (in Mexico its called nixtamal) and
    even explains how to make it - one uses calcium hydroxide
    (slaked or builders lime) to remove the corn hulls.

    Perhaps lye (!) could be used also, but the idea is to take off the
    hulls from the dried corn (while losing some nutrients too, unfortunately.)

    - Jim

    Ummm, maybe I'm a beat or two *behind* everyone here, but... isn't LYE
    something, that as a child, your mother wouldn't even let you LOOK at,
    never mind INGEST? And whats this about Builders Lyme? Isn't that the
    stuff that they use that you can't breathe, eat, smell, get near, etc?
    They're making our food with this?
    
    Things that make you go HMMMMM!
    beth

Right on all counts. Would you like to learn any other horrifying facts
about food processing? Like the many uses of concentrated sulfuric acid?

The use of these otherwise-deadly compounds is fairly common, well
understood, and historically safe. Some of it's been done for centuries
(i.e., not a recent invention of those evil techno weenies). It's
probably safer, in my opinion, than many of the more recent vitamin
fads. In the former case, you're talking about using poisons in
processing which will be completely neutralized or washed away before
you eat the food. In the latter, you're talking about actually
ingesting substances which have been concentrated down to several
million times the concentrations occurring in nature. Which do you
think is likely to be more dangerous?

    Goya brand has two kinds of canned hominy, white and yellow.  I buy it
    at Shaw's and I think A$exander's (yeah, sure the prices are lower now)
    Shop & Save carries it, too.   I like to sprinkle
    some Mrs. Dash Extra Spicy Blend on it.  Of course I have to give one
    of my cats his share before the Mrs. Dash goes on.
    
    Terry
    

    I have it on good authority that what restaurants like Sierras serve
    is sold by Pillsbury in dried form, though I have not seen it
    around here.  I asked at Idylwilde, and they said whenever someone
    asks for something like that they just get some and put it out.
    (Must be how they wound up selling Scotch Bonnet peppers.)

    With regard to the notes about processing with lime,  I've found
    there is actually a nutritional reason for this!  Somehow the indians
    discovered that ash mixed with the corn during hulling and cooking
    prevented pellagra...

From: [email protected] (Dennis Benjamin%Kuntz)
Newsgroups: rec.food.cooking
Subject: Re: Posole or hominy
Date: 5 Oct 91 17:42:27 GMT
Organization: Computer Graphics Laboratory, UCSF
 
In article <[email protected]> [email protected] (Jim Roth) writes:
>
>Posole is a kind of corn that I've been told has been hulled and treated with
>lye - the result when it is cooked is chick pea sized balls that resemble
>potato somewhat. ...
>Does anyone know the history of this stuff? ...
>What about its nutritional value (or lack of...)?

	Harold McGee writes about this in his excellent book _On Food
and Cooking_. It seems that corn is deficient in both lysine and
tryptophan, and the majority of its niacin exists in a bound
state.People whose diet consists of mainly corn develop the disease
pellagra. Lye treatment of corn, which dates back to Aztec and Mayan
civilizations, apparently ameliorates these deficiencies. Zein, the
major storage protein in corn, is also the most deficient in lysine
and tryptophan. Alkaline treatment decreases the availability of zein,
thus reducing the relative deficiency of the amino acids. The
treatment also releases the bound niacin, presumably by denaturing the
carrier proteins. He provides the following reference:
 
Bressani, R "Effect of lime treatment on in vitro availability of
essential amino acids in corn," Journal of Agricultural and Food
Chemistry, 6,(1958),: 774-78
 
	Dennis Benjamin

    Down here in New Mexico Hominy is readily available. I comes canned,
    frozen, dried, you name it we have it. 
    
    It is used in Posole, Menudo, and other Mexican dishes here in the
    southwest. Posole and Menudo are a type of soup or stew that vary
    slightly in ingredients but in my opinion are delicious. Chile(red)
    is one of the ingredients and I've had some posole that can be quite
    hot. 

        	(Nice to see J.R, M.G. in here)  :^)
    
    Ben
         

Hi Ben! Speak of the devil. You never know where some folks are gonna
turn up :-).

    Yea, I generally just read this conference (lots of good recipes
    in here).  
    
    Take care,
    
    Ben

    Hmmm.. the way I was brought up eating hominy, was:
    
    Fry a steak or pork chops. Remove said meat. While grease
    and stuff is still in the pan, throw in the hominy and
    pepper it like crazy.
    
    It's REALLY bad for, but tastes REALLY good....
    
    Other fatty, greasy, easy recipes like this that I grew
    up on were recently (and embarrassingly) found in 
    "The White Trash Cookbook."
    
    I prefer the phrase  "hillbilly food" - my family's from WV and KY.
    
    helen
                                            

re: .-1

Yup - with fried pork chops was always the way I'd had hominy as I was
growing up. I only learned to use it in Mexican dishes over the past
ten years or so.

BTW, the "Mexicali casserole" on the label of Old El Paso Tamales isn't
a bad use for hominy. I hate to admit it, but it's a pretty tasty dish.

-Jack