6 Skills for the Skillet
REMEMBER FRESH IS BEST
You want to make sure your eggs are fresh – it really makes a difference. We purchase our eggs, butter and cream from a farm in Columbia. When you crack a fresh egg and drop it into a pan, the yolk should “sit up” and remain a bit buoyant rather than lay even with the egg white.
AVOID POACHED EGG ‘LEGS’
Anyone who’s tried to poach an egg knows that when you drop the egg into the water it can “spider”. Ours do not spider because we use just a little bit of white vinegar in our poaching water. We recommend adding about a tablespoon of distilled white vinegar to a small pot of boiling water to poach perfectly round eggs.
MAKE THE 20-MINUTE GRITS
Grits are simple, but take time. Sunrise Cafe uses stone-ground hominy grits, which they cook in a moderate boil for 20 minutes, stirring frequently. Now you don’t want to use instant grits. Like they say in that movie ‘My Cousin Vinny,’ every true Southerner knows you have to cook grits for 20 minutes, not five.
START HOT
So much about breakfast food is cooking it at the right temperatures – and that means starting out hot. Don’t pour scrambled eggs into a cold pan. That’s when they start to get dry, because it takes so long to cook them. It’s the same with pancakes; get the griddle hot first. They should bubble within a very short time. If they don’t, they’ll be flat and thick and doughy, and you don’t want that.
PERFECTLY BROWN YOUR HASH BROWNS
If you mix butter with just a little bit of olive oil, the two together keep the butter from burning, so you can get a crispier outside (of the hash browns) and have that butter taste without it burning.
MAKE RUMMY, YUMMY PANCAKES
If your pancake batter has been sitting for a bit, give it another whip to reintroduce some air in there before ladling onto the griddle. And drop fruit or other add-ins onto the pancakes once they’re on the griddle, not into the bowl of batter. (21+ Tip: Sunrise staff makes their banana rum pancakes by spritzing rum from a spray bottle onto the pancakes as they cook.)
Credits: LocalLifeSC.com