Grit Cakes, Fried Cheese

The best thing I do with S.O.S., and it isn’t close. Cook the grits thick, chill them until they set into something you can slice, cut them, fry them. Then I thought this was my own good idea until I found the US Army printed the exact technique in 1910. I’m delighted rather than deflated.

Ingredients

• The grits — built on the Anson Mills / Sean Brock method
• 6 oz (1 cup) coarse stone-ground grits — not instant, see the notes
• 2½ cups filtered water, to soak
• About 1½ cups additional hot water, added during cooking
• 1 tsp fine sea salt

½ tsp black pepper

• Deliberately lean on the fat — read the notes
• 1 Tbsp unsalted butter (the eating version takes 2–3 Tbsp; this doesn’t)
• 2 oz sharp cheddar, grated, added off the heat
• To fry — optional standard breading

Flour, for dredging

• 1 egg, beaten, for the egg wash
• Breadcrumbs
• Neutral oil or lard, for frying at 350°F

Directions

Key ingredients

Black Pepper · Salt

1. Skim the grits. Cover them with the 2½ cups of water, stir once, let them settle for one minute, then skim the chaff and hulls off the top with a fine strainer — gently, so none of the bits sink back. This costs 60 seconds and it’s the single highest-leverage step in the whole recipe. It’s what separates good grits from gritty ones.
2. Soak, covered, at room temperature, overnight. This cuts the cooking time by about half and retains more corn flavour.
3. Bring to a simmer over medium, stirring constantly for 5–8 minutes until the starch takes hold. Drop to the lowest heat and cover.
4. Stir every 10 minutes, adding hot water in 4–5 additions whenever it’s thick enough to stand a spoon up in. Salt at the halfway point. Total: about 50 minutes soaked (about 90 unsoaked).
5. Cook them thicker than you’d eat them. These are going to be sliced.
6. Off the heat, stir in the butter vigorously, then the cheese. Cheese goes in off the heat, at the very end — boil cheese in a sauce and it breaks.
7. Pour the hot grits onto a sheet pan and smooth to an even layer no more than ½ inch thick. Even thickness matters — uneven cakes fry unevenly.
8. Cool loosely covered on the counter, then cover tightly and refrigerate until completely chilled — minimum 4 hours, overnight is better.
9. Cut into squares with a knife, or rounds with a biscuit cutter.
10. Optional breading: flour → egg wash → breadcrumbs. Spoon the crumbs over gently; the cakes tear.
11. Fry at 350°F: 2–3 minutes to golden on the first side, about 2 minutes on the second. Crisp exterior, creamy interior.
12. Top with S.O.S. and an over-easy egg. That’s the whole point of the exercise.

Notes

Why they set: retrogradation

Cooking the grits gelatinizes the starch — the granules absorb water, swell and burst, and amylose and amylopectin unwind into solution. If gelatinization is chaos and unwinding, retrogradation is order being rebuilt: as the mass cools, those freed chains realign into crystalline structure and squeeze water back out of the gel network, firming it.

The key asymmetry, and it’s the whole answer: amylose recrystallizes rapidly on cooling; amylopectin is considerably slower. Amylose is linear, so it packs closely and tightly. Amylopectin is branched, so it packs loosely. High-amylose starches form very firm, opaque gels — and corn is high-amylose.

So: cooked grits set into a sliceable gel within hours of chilling (that’s the amylose), and keep firming over a day (that’s the amylopectin, still working). Which is exactly why overnight beats four hours.

Bonus, and it changes how you think about the chill: some retrogradation before frying actively helps the texture — the retrograded surface enters a glassy state that crisps better. The chill isn’t just for handling. It improves the crust.

⚠ Instant grits will not work

Because the set depends on amylose, instant grits set poorly — they’re pre-gelatinized and heavily degerminated, with damaged starch. There isn’t an intact amylose network there to rebuild. Use coarse stone-ground.

⚠ Go easier on the cheese and butter than you would for eating grits

Fat interferes with the amylose network and gives you a softer, more fragile cake. That’s why this recipe takes 1 Tbsp of butter where the eating version takes 2–3, and a modest 2 oz of cheese.

Flagging this honestly: that’s my reasoning from the retrogradation science, not a sourced claim. Nobody has published it. Test it against a fattier batch and tell me I’m wrong.

⚠ “Hominy grits” are not hominy

US federal documents define hominy grits as degerminated, enriched corn grits — the USDA’s own Commercial Item Description says instant hominy grits “must be derived from specially processed degerminated corn grits,” and the words lime, alkali and nixtamal appear nowhere in it. It’s a legacy name, not a process claim. There is also no FDA standard of identity for “grits” at all.

The 1910 Army already had this

Manual for Army Cooks (1910), Recipe 197, “Hominy, fried (for 60 men)”, verbatim:

6 pounds hominy. 4 gallons water.

Place the water in a boiler on the range; when boiling add the hominy and boil from twenty to thirty minutes; remove from the boiler, spread about 1 inch deep in well-greased pans and allow to cool; cut in pieces about 2 inches square; roll in flour and fry in deep lard. Serve hot with sirup or butter.

Chill, cut, flour, deep-fry — printed in a government manual in 1910, and the same trick as Cornmeal Mush, Fried.

Sources: Anson Mills recipe #489 (the skim, the soak, the timings); Sean Brock’s 1:4 staged ratio; Cook’s Illustrated and the starch-retrogradation literature.