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Ok- making the black eyed peas, collards and so on tomorrow.
Which is better- hog jowls or fatback? I used to love the crunchiness of the rind when my Grand Ma made fatback but I tried last year and it was so salty you could not eat it.
of the two, I would choose the fatback. You can rinse it off and that will take a lot of the salt away.
Or as an alternative (a smaller dose of the fatback) you can buy pork cracklin's. Some will fry them up and eat them or fry them and then put them in cornbread, cracklin' cornbread is good stuff.
Whatever you make, hope you enjoy.
Happy New Year!
Cook up the beans with a hog jowl or better a hamhock. Slice up the fatback, fry it like bacon, and add it to the collards. Save some of the fried fatback for eating by itself.
Here's an alternative: As someone who was raised on ham hocks or fatback in the collard greens, I have found a new way of cooking them that is very flavorful, and much better for you. I slow cook my collards with salt, pepper, red pepper flakes , a few pinches of sugar , and olive oil. The soul food purists in my family, and in-laws all love them, and we dont miss the pork seasonings at all. I know it sounds yucky and bland, but this is quite good.
Maybe it is because I am a native Texan, but I prefer to use bacon! LOL
Cut the slices in quarters and add them to the mix. Nothing wrong with saltpork and hambones -- and they can be used in tandem -- but bacon and just the right amount of bacon grease are what make black-eyed peas what the Good Lord intended them to be!
P.S. Just to mention, you gotta have cornbread...and if there is some fresh fried okra? Oh man, you got a sweet bit of Dixie heaven!
:-( That stuff will kill u. If you are looking for flavor only, try smoked turkey necks or wings.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ADR
Ok- making the black eyed peas, collards and so on tomorrow.
Which is better- hog jowls or fatback? I used to love the crunchiness of the rind when my Grand Ma made fatback but I tried last year and it was so salty you could not eat it.
Harris Teeter and Dollar General has greens that are preseasoned in the can. Get a can of those and a non-seasoned can and combine the two, because the seasoning is a little too much in the preseasoned can. They are delicious. I forget the brand but it is very easy to read the cans and see which are preseasoned. I have been buying those for a while and will never go back to seasoning my own. I am sure some of the other grocery stores have these too, but these are the stores where I buy them. Dollar General is cheaper, I think. Sometimes it is hard to tell which is cheaper because the cans are different sizes.
Oh, and we use hushpuppies and bake frozen hushpuppies in the oven. We like this better than corn bread and it is much easier to fix for a couple of people. (Corn bread would be much less fat, but my husband just doesn't eat much corn bread and we end up with so much waste.)
I found black-eyed peas in a bag that was dried with the seasoning in the bag. It was 40 cents more expensive than the non-seasoned ones. The fat content of this is much less than using the real thing. Haven't cooked them yet, so I cannot vouch for them, but we don't do fat anymore because of health issues.
I have a question about the New Year's green leafy food. Our family had always used turnip or mustard greens (I don't like mustard greens.) for the New Year's green leafy food. I was told yesterday that it has to be collard greens, so we are combining a can of turnip greens with a can of collard greens because my husband does not like collard greens.
I was a senior citizen before I ever knowingly ate collard greens at a restaurant in Marshville. I found that I like them better because they have a milder flavor. My husband does not like the bigger stalk that shows up in the collard greens. So since I don't like mustard greens and he doesn't like collard greens we usually eat the in between taste of turnip greens.
I am wondering if spinach could be an acceptable green food for New Year's wealth choice. Guess it is time to look up this tradition on the web.
Oh, for the person who was wanting to know about the best seasoning, I would think a ham hock would be first choice, but they can be hard to come by sometimes. I have used a very fat pork chop to flavor pinto beans and think that may be a good substitute. The purpose for the meat is flavor and not fat, so the leaner the pork the better. Just fatback has very little flavor.
Last edited by NCN; 01-01-2010 at 10:58 AM..
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