5 Country Cooking Secrets from Cracker Barrel

Hashbrown Casserole

This is the restaurant's most popular side—and now it can be your family's favorite at home: Use colby cheese, instead of cheddar, in your hashbrown casserole, which one former Cracker Barrel employee says more closely mimics the actual recipe. Combine all of the ingredients the day before (taking the potatoes straight from the freezer, instead of letting them thaw), then cover and refrigerate the uncooked casserole over night. Finally, use a large spoon to place dollops of the mixture into a greased pan, rather than patting it down firmly with your hand. 

Want a recipe? The person who submitted this one claims her parents acquired it while working on a Cracker Barrel training video. Worth a try, right? 

Biscuits
One Cracker Barrel cook says the secret to the pillowy little biscuits is simplicity: White Lily self-rising flour (2 cups), buttermilk (2/3 cup), shortening (1/3 cup), and nothing more. Combine the flour and shortening, add the buttermilk, and mix for one minute; roll 'em out, cut 'em into circles, and bake for  8 minutes at 450° F. While they're hot, brush your biscuits with melted butter. An awesome quote from the Cracker Barrel employee who leaked this recipe: "That's how I do it, and cannot say if that's how I also do it at work." Sounds like a guilty conscience to me. 

Meatloaf
Instead of using standard breadcrumbs in your meatloaf, crumble up homemade buttermilk biscuits, which employees say is the key to a Cracker Barrel-like loaf. 

Fried Apples
You'll find bacon drippings in most copycat recipes for Cracker Barrel's fried apples, but at least one employee says that addition isn't actually a part of the recipe. 

Pancakes
The pancake mix for sale in the country store is likely the same stuff used in the kitchen: One former worker says the chefs just use a mix (which has an unusual ingredient: rye flour), to which they add water, wait 10 minutes for the batter to rise, and then whisk until smooth. The ideal temperature for your griddle: 400° F

9 Southern-Cooking Secrets

Dinner, courtesy of my mama.

Some of my fondest childhood memories are in the kitchen. While my mom cooked, I would stand on a wooden chair watching, eagerly absorbing my first lessons in Southern cooking. This is how Southern women have learned to cook for generations—simply by observing their mothers or grandmothers at work, hoping for the occasional nugget of unsolicited wisdom: Always pack your brown sugar. Never buy store-brand flour. Don't grease the cookie pan. 

      Unfortunately, most of these stove-top secrets are never written down. And because Southern women tend to cook by feel, rather than by rules, their recipes are often imprecise—a fistful of flour, $2 worth of apples. Church cookbooks can be even worse. More often than not, at least one ingredient has been forgotten entirely. The church ladies that write them probably stopped using recipes decades ago, so when they type out instructions, the flour or baking powder simply slips their mind. 

      I don't want to risk losing the foods that defined my childhood—cornbread, fried okra, banana nut bread—so I set out to learn the techniques to perfect them. On a recent trip home to Tennessee, I sat down with my mom at our old Formica kitchen table, where she shared her secrets, some passed down from my grandmother and great-grandmother.

Season your skillet.

    

       New skillets are a gray, dull hue. Seasoned skillets, on the other hand, are shiny and black. This greasy coating keeps food from sticking to the pan, so it browns more evenly. To season your skillet, rub it liberally with Crisco, and place it in a 250°F oven for an hour. Use only a small amount of soap and water when washing your skillet, never allowing it to soak—this will wash away your Crisco coating, and may even cause your cookware to rust. Re-season as needed, usually once or twice a year. 

Befriend bacon grease.

       When my mom was a kid, my grandma kept a jar of bacon grease on the stove top. Now, my mom keeps a Mason jar of the fat in her refrigerator, and uses it for everything from greasing skillets to flavoring beans. After frying a batch of bacon, simply pour the leftover grease into a tightly sealed glass jar. A word of caution: If you're using it to grease a baking pan—say, for cornbread—sprinkle cornmeal over top of the bacon grease; otherwise, your food will stick to the pan. 

Don't toss the ham bone.

        The truly Southern way to prepare beans: Add pork to the pot. To make perfect pintos, rinse off dry beans, pour them into a large saucepan, and cover completely with water. Bring the beans to a boil, then add either a ham bone (with a little meat intact), a 2" by 4" rectangle of fatback, or a little bacon grease. Allow the beans to cook down 'til tender, about 3 to 4 hours, season with salt and pepper, and serve with cornbread and chow chow.

Pick your potatoes.

       Buying the wrong spuds is the fastest route to lumpy mashed potatoes. Russet potatoes, which are usually the cheapest, have an unfortunate tendency to cook unevenly when boiled. And the uncooked areas are what create lumps. Stick with Idaho, Yukon Gold, or red potatoes—you'll have to shell out a little more for these guys, but it's worth it for the smoother texture. 

Flour before you bread. 

       People mock Southerners for frying everything. What they don't realize is that it takes talent to do so. Cooking with scalding oil and coming out unscathed is tough! Foods that have high water content—tomatoes, squash, zucchini—require an extra step before being breaded and dunked in hot oil. Before dipping 'em in the egg/milk mixture and cornmeal, coat water-rich veggies in flour to absorb some of the moisture, which is what causes hot oil to pop (and burn you). 

Properly heat your oil. 

       Allow your frying oil to heat up too long, and you'll "cook the hound dog out of your okra," my mother warns. But if you don't let it heat up long enough, the batter will either become mushy or just fall off altogether. Neither is your goal. So perform a test run: Drop a spoonful of batter into the hot oil. Does it crisp and rise to the surface? If so, you're ready to start frying. If it burns, you need to turn the heat down, or if it just sinks, you need to heat the oil a little longer. Once you start frying, only immerse a spatula-full of battered veggies at a time. If the pan is too crowded, your food won't be sufficiently crisped.

Paper your pans.

       Even the most delicious cake recipe is a failure if it sticks to the pan. Avoid leaving half your cake behind: First, coat the bottom and sides of a round cake pan with Crisco. Then, place a large piece of wax paper over the pan, and position a second cake pan of the same size on top. Press it down to create a pan-and-paper sandwich. Trim the edges of the wax paper, then remove the top pan. Coat the wax paper with Crisco and flour before pouring your batter into the prepared pan. While the pan is still warm after cooking, flip it upside down, peel the wax paper off of the cake, and place the finished product on a cooling rack.

Select bananas with care.

Perfect for banana nut bread.

       Two Southern classics require the yellow fruit: banana nut bread and banana pudding. But the two dishes may as well use a different fruit entirely. The ideal peel for banana nut bread is dark, almost black, whereas the bananas in your pudding should have green skin. Since you mash the bananas in bread, they need to be extremely ripe—soft and slightly squishy. (Hint: Make sure to remove the fibrous strings before mashing.) But you want banana pudding to last as long as possible, so the bananas should still be slightly green. If the fruit is already ripe, your dessert will stay fresh for only a day or two. 

Coat raisins in flour.

     
       If a bread, cake, or muffin recipe calls for dried fruit, toss the shriveled guys in flour before stirring them into the batter. The flour coating helps suspend the fruit in the batter, so all of your raisins don't end up in the bottom of the pan.

Family Recipe: Party Chicken!

Now that I live in the Northeast, I am forced, as a Southern transplant, to endure The Questions:

1. Do you wear shoes?
2. Does your family have teeth?
3. Do you eat fried chicken a lot?

     The answers: sometimes, yes, and no. My family has never heeded the call of the KFC bucket. Our poultry of choice is Party Chicken. People, of course, laugh at the nondescript, yet distinctly Southern name of our signature dish. But once they taste the bacon-wrapped deliciousness, they stop laughing. They're too busy begging for seconds. 

      Instead of baking a ham on Easter, my grandmother always made Party Chicken by the panful. It takes an agonizing 4 hours to cook, so my childhood Easter Sundays were often spent rocking on the glider on my grandma's front porch, tormented by the savory smell of dinner. By the time Party Chicken comes out of the oven, I've always conveniently forgotten that I don't eat beef. (In fact, when no one's looking, I steal the dried beef from the piece of chicken next to mine.) It's that good. 

What you need
8 half boneless, skinless chicken breasts
8 slices bacon
1 carton sour cream (8 oz)
1 jar dried beef
1 can condensed cream of mushroom soup
½ cup water 

Put it all together

1. Preheat oven to 250°F. 
2. Soak dried beef in boiling water for 2 or 3 minutes. Chop beef, then place in the bottom of a 9x13" baking dish. 
3. Wrap each chicken breast in bacon. Place on top of beef. (To ensure more even cooking of bacon, you can also simply drape the chicken with bacon.)
4. Mix the sour cream and condensed soup with water. Pour over chicken. Cover baking dish with aluminum foil. 
5. Bake for 3 hours, then uncover and bake for another hour. 

Court Cafe Southern Buttermilk Biscuits

The perfect biscuit: crispy outside, pillowy inside.

In the South, where I grew up, buttermilk biscuits signify something much deeper than the start of a hearty meal. They're the symbol of down-home tradition, of a place where dinner doesn't come from a can. The irony is that the only biscuits most people can make are those Pillsbury Flaky canned jobs—a shameful adulteration of the real thing. Mimicking the pillowy perfection of Granny's biscuits is admittedly tough. They're finicky little things, requiring both time-honored technique and a real Southern recipe. And, no, Paula Deen isn't the answer. 

        I learned my technique from Margaret Byrd, who cooked for two decades at a mom-and-pop diner, Court Cafe, in my hometown. The café stood at the tail end of Knoxville's main thoroughfare, Kingston Pike, a stretch of which was once a moonshiners' route. Back in the 1930s, Court Cafe served breakfast and lunch to guests of a nearby motel, long since demolished. Later, it became the morning spot of dozens of locals, my parents included. 

       The cafe was once featured in a documentary about Hank Williams Sr., but it was still best known for its food: sausage gravy, biscuits, chicken and dumplings, all the classics of home cookin'. Then, a few years back, as strip malls sprang up in the area, Court Cafe was forced to suddenly close. And my parents were forced to eat sausage biscuits at Hardee's. An utter tragedy. Fortunately, with the help of Byrd, you'll never reach such a level of biscuit desperation. 

    

The perfect homemade biscuit, she says, starts with soft flour, baking powder, Crisco, and ice-cold buttermilk. It sounds simple, but Byrd swears by it. "You can tell the difference between a homemade and a store-bought biscuit," Byrd told me. "We use White Lily Flour, nothin’ but White Lily Flour, self-rising. Our biscuits are made the old-timey way with buttermilk. We don’t add any water at all. That’s all I have ever seen my Mom do." 

     The recipe is basic, but it's easy to screw up the technique. Working the dough for more than 2 or 3 minutes will make your biscuits tough, as will twisting the biscuit cutter—or in Byrd's mother's kitchen, the round edge of a tin can. 

Court Cafe Southern Buttermilk Biscuits

What you need

2 cups self-rising White Lily flour
¼ cup Crisco (vegetable shortening) 
¾ cold buttermilk
½ Tbsp baking powder
Melted salted butter


Put it all together

1. Preheat the oven to 500°F.
2. Sift the flour and baking powder together. Then using your hands or a pastry blender, gently cut in the vegetable shortening to create a coarse mixture.
3. Stir in the buttermilk, only until a soft dough firms, then turn it onto a lightly floured surface. Knead it for 2 to 3 minutes, no longer. 
4. With a rolling pin, flatten the dough to ½” thickness. Then without twisting, cut out your biscuits. Arrange them on an ungreased baking sheet, with each round barely kissing its neighbor.
5. Bake 10-12 minutes, and immediately after removing, brush the tops with melted butter.