Um-mmm-good!
Hominy fried in bacon grease!!
A very good side dish.
May even coax you out of lurking in the shadows?
And (hominy) grits is just simple good living.
Fried grits+++!!!
Lutefisk not for me.
Specific foods processed with sodium hydroxide include:
German pretzels are poached in a boiling sodium carbonate solution or cold sodium hydroxide solution before baking, which contributes to their unique crust.
Lye-water is an essential ingredient in the crust of the traditional baked Chinese moon cakes.
Most yellow coloured Chinese noodles are made with lye-water but are commonly mistaken for containing egg.
Sodium hydroxide is also the chemical that causes gelling of egg whites in the production of Century eggs.
Some methods of preparing olives involve subjecting them to a lye-based brine.[38]
The Filipino dessert (kakanin) called kutsinta uses a small quantity of lye water to help give the rice flour batter a jelly like consistency. A similar process is also used in the kakanin known as pitsi-pitsi or pichi-pichi except that the mixture uses grated cassava instead of rice flour.
The Norwegian dish known as lutefisk (from lutfisk, “lye fish”).
Bagels are often boiled in a lye solution before baking, contributing to their shiny crust.
Hominy is dried maize (corn) kernels reconstituted by soaking in lye-water. These expand considerably in size and may be further processed by frying to make corn nuts or by drying and grinding to make grits. Hominy is used to create Masa, a popular flour used in Mexican cuisine to make Corn tortillas and tamales. Nixtamal is similar, but uses calcium hydroxide instead of sodium hydroxide.
Ah, jeez—trying to ruin Chinese and Mexican food for me?
(There wasn’t much to salvage as it was from the German and Norwegian!)