The Creamy Ingredient You Already Have That Takes Boring Grits To New Heights

When it comes to Southern American cuisine, comfort food is the name of the game. Everything from macaroni and cheese to mashed potatoes and gravy simply tastes better coming from a Southern-style kitchen. The same is true for the South's most iconic dinner table staple — creamy grits. Made from coarsely ground dried corn kernels, grits have a long and storied history and have filled bellies in the South for centuries. Despite being made from simple ingredients, made correctly, Southern-style grits are one of the tastiest things you can put in your mouth.

That being said, grits have little flavor on their own. Sure, corn is a little sweet, earthy, and nutty, but simply boiling ground corn in water is bound to produce the most boring porridge ever made — which is why it's almost never made this way. Instead, it's typically cooked in a good amount of delicious fat and stock and infused with flavor combos that are sure to give your grits an upgrade. One such addition is not only deeply delicious, but it can also fix loose, bland, or gummy grits in seconds: cream cheese.

Cream cheese not only infuses grits with rich, tangy flavor, it also softens them into a luscious texture that can stand up to everything from grilled shrimp to poached eggs to salty collard greens. Grits mixed with cream cheese can also skew sweet, serving as the perfect foundation for berries marinated in ACV and honey, or preserved fruit.

Though it seems almost impossible to add too much cheese to any dish (Parmesan mountain at Olive Garden, anyone?), overwhelming your grits with cream cheese can quickly take it from deliciously velvety side dish to weirdly gritty cream cheese spread. The idea is to add just enough cream cheese to achieve the perfect balance of texture and flavor without it being too prominent in the finished dish. Generally speaking, you'll want about 1 part cream cheese to 2 parts grits — so ¼ cup cream cheese for ½ cup of uncooked grits.

However, this ratio may change if you use other dairy-based ingredients, such as shredded block cheese, or cook your grits in milk. In these cases, it's best to add cream cheese a tablespoon at a time until you get the right consistency. In any of these cases, you're unlikely to use up a whole standard 15-ounce block, so you'll want to have some ideas for using up leftover cream cheese in your back pocket, such as throwing it into an omelet, making fruit dip, or even making more grits to freeze for future meals.

Once you've perfected the consistency of your cream cheese-infused grits, you'll want to build flavor with some other bold ingredients, such as your favorite hot sauce, plenty of fresh cracked pepper, or even some lemon zest. These are particularly delicious with fried seafood, such as earthy catfish, beautifully golden brown crab cakes, or breaded prawns.