Hush puppies and buttermilk biscuits!

SO I had a housewarming and decided to do southern style food after being in North Carolina for a family wedding in June. For the most part everything went great but in my new and tiny little kitchen I have learned a few lessons.

1.Small kitchens are tough to do a lot cooking in at once especially when several items are deep fried items like hush puppies and fried chicken.

2.Might be smarter to invest in deep fryer than do stove top in the future.

3.Prepping as much food as you can a day or more in advance helps a lot though. It could have been much much worse had I not made several items and done a lot of prep so I could just get going the day of with as few tasks as possible.

I think the hush puppies were my favorite of the stuff I made I also really liked the biscuits and the chicken but I will not ever make that much fried chicken again! I made about 30 pieces it was waaay too much work! See the blog I did right before this one for the recipe.

First thing is I just went ahead and used Bisquick for my biscuits and substituted buttermilk for the milk portion and it worked beautifully. I prefer rolled and cut biscuits to drop biscuits even though it takes a little more time I just prefer them that way.

SO if you want easy buttermilk biscuits just do what I did!(I even microwaved and then toasted the left over biscuits for a few days after the party and that tasted great.)

Now on to the hush puppies! If you have never tried a hush puppy the easiest way to describe it is that it is, for the most part, a bite sized-deep fried piece of corn bread, with some minor differences. If you like corn bread sweet or not should determine how you like your hush puppies is my feeling. I like mine sweet so that is how I proceeded.

I tried this recipe first: http://www.saveur.com/article/Recipes/Classic-Hush-Puppies

But in the end it was not sweet enough and so I did some slight modifications like so:
Ingredients:

1 ¹⁄₂ cups all-purpose flour

1 ¹⁄₂ cups cornmeal

2 tbsp. baking powder

4 tbsp. sugar

1 tbsp. baking soda

2 tsp. kosher salt

1 ¹⁄₄ cups buttermilk

2 eggs

1 medium SWEET yellow onion, chopped in a food processor

Vegetable oil, for frying

I doubled the sugar in the recipe and used a sweet onion; this provided more of the sweet taste I am used to in my hush puppies. It by no means makes it sweet like a dessert but the other recipe has zero sweetness and just tasted wrong.(I also cannot eat hot and spicy so the cayenne was left out too!)

First mix all the dry ingredients togeher and mix well. Then in a seperate bowl mix all the wet ingredients including the onion, and it's juice/liquid, that has been finely chopped in a food processor, the orginal recipe called for grating the onion which was time consuming messy and really really not fun so I just put it in my FP and was able to get the same result as well as plenty of the onion juice.

Then slowly mix both batches of ingredients together make sure to mix it gently but thoroughly so it is all mixed together.

Let it sit for 1 hour. The buttermilk, baking soda etc makes the batter puff up really nicely so be sure to let it rest for the 1 hour or your hush puppies won't cook right!

Puffed up hush puppy batter! This is a double batch so do not freak out when your batch does not look as big.

About 40 minutes into letting the hush puppy batter rise fill a 3 quart pot(stainless steel works well in this case) with about 3-4 inches of vegetable oil. I prefered this over canola as I felt it cooked the hush puppies to a nicer brown and were not as heavy tasting as the batch I did in canola oil.If you use a larger pan the amount of oil will be lower, for example a 5-6 quart pot will be more like 2-3 inches of oil.  Heat the oil to 350 degrees, if you do not have a thermometer I found it was hot enough when the oil started to make wavy lines at the bottom of the pan.

Set up a plate with paper towels by the stove and second plate to move the finished puppies onto.

Once the Hush puppies have sat for an hour and the oil is ready use some kind of scoop(I used my medium sized cookie batter scoop) and start scooping into the hot oil I was able to fit about 8-10 in my 3 quart pot at a time.(this recipe makes about 30)

Now the cooking is kind of an eye ball it method the orginal recipe says about 2 minutes each side but you should still be watching them to make sure they are nice medium golden brown on all sides. If it gets a little darker that is fine, but do not undercook or they will still be raw in the middle.

Once they are done lift them out and place on the paper towls to soak up the excess oil then start the next batch. While that batch cooks flip the first batch to soak up more oil then move them to the second plate. Add more paper towls to the first plate if needed for the next finished batch.

Repeat until all the batter is gone and you have about 30 beautiful and golden brown hush puppies! I like to eat my hush puppies with several types of condiments, mustard, catsup, tarter sauce use whatever you like, but watch out, they can be addicting.