Reinterpreting the Fritter in the Country

New York Times, August 3, 2005 | By MATT LEE and TED LEE (NYT)

The hams curing in Robert Stehling's garage, just a few feet from his 1968 Plymouth Barracuda muscle car, would seem to ratify Mr. Stehling's claim to a North Carolina heritage, no matter how far afield he has traveled.

"I'm not trying to hide my country cousin roots," he said recently.

But talk to Mr. Stehling, the chef and owner of the Hominy Grill here, whose conversation can trip from water-powered gristmills to Debbie Harry to the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, and you will find that while he hasn't lost touch with where he was born and raised, he has certainly redefined what it means to be country.

The same might be said of Mr. Stehling's cooking, which tweaks the region's classic dishes in ways that pay homage to tradition but also show contemporary Southern cooking to be brimming with possibilities.

Take, for example, the shrimp and okra beignets he was preparing in his home kitchen on a recent steamy day. Beignets, deep-fried holeless doughnuts, are most commonly found in Louisiana, where they were brought by French settlers in the 18th century. In New Orleans they are a culinary icon, most often served lightly sweetened, dusted with powdered sugar, and eaten with a cup of coffee.

Mr. Stehling spins beignets in a savory direction, adding two pillars of coastal South Carolina, or Lowcountry, cuisine: shrimp and okra. And the dips for his beignets - a fresh tomato salsa and sour cream spiked with lime and cilantro - add another layer of interest and forge an alluring Southern-Mexican fusion.

As he sliced okra into thin rounds, Mr. Stehling said: "The okra's ropiness is important to holding these beignets together. I want to expose as much surface area as possible so all the good stuff can ooze out."

Mr. Stehling placed the sliced okra in a bowl that held a mixture of chopped yellow onion and green pepper, and finely diced jalape–o pepper. He freehanded a splash of half-and-half from a carton, added a beaten egg, and scattered a small amount of all-purpose flour and breadcrumbs from a can.

"Mix this up so it's like a soggy cereal," he said, and he turned the bowl's contents several times with a long spoon. It should look like Rice Krispies Treats before they go into the pan, he said, and he set aside the okra to give it time to release more liquid, more slime. "In 20 minutes you're going to see this bowl transformed into a batter that can fry." Mr. Stehling poured close to a quart of peanut oil into a three-quart pot, and set the pot over a medium-high flame.

"I want to go on record saying that peanut oil is the best oil for frying," he said. "You can get a really high heat on it without it breaking down. Sometimes I like to use corn oil for its flavor, but it loses its viscosity and breaks down twice as fast as peanut oil."

Mr. Stehling reached for the bowl of resting batter. The okra had indeed oozed significantly, and as he beat air into the mixture with a few strokes of a slotted metal serving spoon, it looked as if the okra, onion and peppers were being held together by whipped egg whites.

From his refrigerator Mr. Stehling retrieved a bowl of shrimp that he had peeled earlier that morning. The shrimp had pinkish lines of roe running down their backs. "When you've got roe shrimp, don't devein them, or you'll lose the flavor of all that roe," he said.

He recalled that when he moved from New York to Charleston, almost 10 years ago, finding a job had been difficult.

At the time there was a glut of able kitchen talent in Charleston, and no restaurateur was willing to pay more than minimum wage to any cook - not even one with 16 years of experience. In fact, Mr. Stehling explained, had he not found a defunct restaurant space with owners desperate to turn over their lease, he might still have the job he had pined for in his disillusionment: shrimp boat deckhand.

Mr. Stehling chopped the shrimp roughly and folded them into the okra mixture. He scooped up a blob of batter a shade larger than a Ping-Pong ball. With the back of a second serving spoon, he nudged it into the hot oil, where it shot across its surface, burbling and popping with a locomotion all its own.

As the beignets browned, Mr. Stehling prodded them with his slotted spoon, turning them in the oil so they cooked evenly. He had warmed up the oven, expecting to pile the first batch on a plate lined with a paper towel. But the condiments were within close range of us, and the light, puffy beignets never made it to the oven.

Each bite contained the deep green flavors of okra and peppers, as well as the sweetness of shrimp. A dip in the cool citrus sour cream and sprightly salsa balanced the richness of the fried beignets.

Their crunchy outsides provided a nice contrast to the more yielding textures of the shrimp, okra and onion inside. In fact, the beignets seemed to hit all the points on the textural spectrum except for one: slimy.