Use your ChefAlarm ® to set a high-temp alarm at that temperature and a low-temp alarm at 350☏ (177☌). To prevent that, we want to cook them at a respectable 375☏ (191☌). Hush puppy oil temperaturesįried as they are, hush puppies can easily fall into the cooking-so-fast-the-outside-burns-before-the-inside-cooks or the cooking-so-slow-they-become-soggy-with-oil traps. The dish itself seems first to have been served in South Carolina under the name “red horse bread.”īut a rose by any other name would be just as tasty next to some fried fish and slaw, right? The important thing is really what they are, and they are delicious. In truth, it is likely that the term employed “puppies” as a metaphor for a growling stomach. There are many fanciful, folky stories about how they came to be, but it is almost certain that it had nothing to do with quieting dogs down while frying fish. Why are they called hush puppies?įor an exhaustive and excellent look at the origins of hush puppies and the origin of the name, I recommend reading Robert Moss’s piece on the subject. Other versions may be wetter, and those also have merit, but these are so good and so fast, I doubt I’ll stray much from this recipe in the future. They are not scooped and dropped right into the oil, but are rolled into balls, roughly the size of a whole walnut, by hand, then slipped into the hot oil to cook. This version has a very thick batter, almost more of a dough. Styles abound, of course, with regional and sub-regional variations, and you can gussy yours up as much as you want-but there’s really no need to push these tasty bits into any new territory. In fact, the version we’ll present here-based on a recipe from -is so simple, it doesn’t even have any egg in the mix. They are made with a simple batter that is simply seasoned, usually with a little cayenne pepper and garlic, and studded with chopped onion. What are hush puppies?įirst, we should talk about what we’re talking about: hush puppies are cornmeal fritters. These simple sides are easy to whip up and well worth the effort, but there are one or two thermal tricks that can help you ace hush puppies from the get-go, even if you’ve never had them before. Now, granted, I haven’t spoken to every catfish-loving person in or from the South, but the fact that so many people from so many parts of the South all agreed on the same thing says something.Īnd, since we recently published a piece on fried catfish, we thought we may as well help you out with the hush puppies. Every Southerner I have talked to about it, and I mean every one of them, has told me that the proper accompaniment to a catfish fry (or any other fish fry for that matter) is hush puppies.
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