Hush Puppies look okay, ultimately FAIL

First things first. I rarely eat fried foods. I think I eat french fries about four times a year. Fried anything else, a rarity.

Screeeech. But being from Louisiana, I do love me a good ol’ hush puppy. My favorites are from The Chimes in Baton Rouge. So that’s what I had in mind when I flipped open The Martha Stewart Living Cookbook to page 57 and saw the recipe for hush puppies.

Ugh. My first attempt at Veganizing Martha’s Muffin – Appetizer Week was about as pitiful as the picture above. Kind of okay in that you could tell what it was supposed to be, but off-focus in taste and authenticity. FAIL on first bite.

Part of the failure is my own fault. But I attribute a substantial part of what went wrong to the poorly-constructed, original recipe. Martha, Martha, Martha! Everyone knows that a hush puppy is all about the cornmeal! Yours? Big balls o’ flour. That ain’t right!

So here is what I learned from last night’s experiment in veganizing Martha’s hush puppies:

• Listen to my intuition, especially if I think aloud, “that much flour! and so little cornmeal!”
• Do not let my fear of deep frying influence my decision to use less than half the oil suggested for the recipe. No matter what, hush puppies need deep frying; they need submerging to come out right.
• Speaking of deep frying, hush puppies need to be fried in peanut oil. That, I got right! Peanut oil imparts a nice flavor to the supposed cornmeal in the recipe.
• Use tongs. That big ol’ spatula was too awkward and dorky.
• Have confidence in my substitutions (or lack of), the flour was too much of a player and messed things up, not my tweaks.
  
• Adding in some sugar was the right choice for my Chimes hush puppy replication. But I’ll use Tabasco instead of cayenne next time.
• Next time? But yes. This fail was not epic enough to abandon the vegan hush puppy project. I’ll try again!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 7th, 2009 at 9:59 pm and is filed under Southern, Vegan MoFo 2009, Veganizing Marth's Muffin. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.