Making Hominy II

So far, my experiments in making hominy are big flops. The first batch might have eventually turned to hominy, but I had no clue it was going to take hours and hours of cooking. It looked like a big glop, and it was 2:00 a.m. I abandoned it.

Boiling the corn in the lime solution.

Making Hominy I

First attempt and it seems
to be starting to become hominy.

I'm giving making hominy a try. I almost feel deprived growing up in the South and not having had any relatives that made it. Alas, I didn't; therefore, I'm having to do research on the internet. I've found quite a few recipes for making it with lye or potash. Lye seems to be something that is rare in stores around here. I remember buying it once for soap making, but Uncle Charles says they don't sell it anymore. Likely I could get it online. Nor do I think in this heat I want to start a fire and putz around making woodash/potash lye.

There are relatively fewer recipes on the internet for making hominy with lime, but in my search I stumbled across another method for making it using baking soda, which they claim was done a lot in the South. Since I've been making lime pickles and have a lot of pickling lime on hand, I'm going to start off using that.

Searching on the internet has led me to a lot of interesting sites and much more chemistry than I really want to remember. I had more success searching on nixtamal or nixtimalization, which is the name of the process of making hominy, and the Mexican word for it. They are the ones, ya know, who invented the process. However, here are some links to various sites I thought were helpful or just plain interesting.