The Ultimate Southern Corn Chowder | The Old Mill Corn Chowder Recipe (Pigeon Forge, TN) and review!

Visit https://wildgrain.com/bates and use code BATES at checkout to receive $30 your first box + free croissants for life!

The corn chowder from the Old Mill in Pideon Forge, Tn is what I think of every time I think of corn chowder. There are a lot of great recipes out there, but to me, this will always be the chowder I measure other recipes by!

If you have ever eaten there, a small bowl of corn chowder and a plate with their maple butter and hushpuppies is the start to one of the best “home cooking” dining experiences I’ve had in Tennessee. I don’t really know if I can publish their recipe, so I am linking it directly to the website right here! If you haven’t tried it before, try this and let me know what you think! https://www.old-mill.com/oldmill-recipes/the-old-mill-corn-chowder

#cornchowder #chowder #easyrecipe #homecook #homerecipe #southerncooking #dinnerrecipe #soup #souprecipe #soupseason #dad #familyrecipes #family

If you have ever been to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, and went to the Old Meal, then before you had your meal, they probably gave you a bowl of their famous corn chowder. And I found the recipe online. My mom actually told me that, you know, that recipe is online. I think that’s a hint. And so I’m going to be taking her bowl of this as well. But here you go. The famous Old Meal corn chowder right here in the Bates Kitchen. Once you start cooking, one of the first things you start doing is critiquing all the other recipes. But like I said, this is a favorite of ours exactly the way it’s made from the old meal in Pigeon Forge. So, I’m going to follow their recipe exactly. Now, typically, I would do things like instead of using the cracker flour mixture to thicken, I would make a R or things like that, but let’s just go with what they’ve done because we already love it and quit trying to change it up. So, we’re going to peel three potatoes. I put four out here, but I don’t need four. Already making a mess. I don’t mean to make a mess. My wife’s like, “Why are you such a messy cooker?” I don’t know. I just cook with messy ingredients, I reckon. I try not to, and then they make a mess. Anyways, peel our potatoes real quick here. And that’s going to give kind of that potato soup similarity. I think it kind of makes that chowder so hearty. And this is a little bit bit different from a lot of your popular corn chowder recipes because it’s got a little bit of that umami from the clam juice, which I’ll get to later. Kind of adds not quite a clam chowder, not quite a corn chowder. It’s just a little bit different. And from the first time we’ve had it there, I loved it. So, I keep making it because that’s what I love to do is make the things that I love. And I especially love it when restaurants that I love put their recipes online because that makes it so much easier than trying to figure out what they did. A special thank you to Wild Grain for sponsoring today’s video. Today I’m going to be making their pumpkin cinnamon biscuits. I don’t know if you’ve heard of Wild Grain or not, but they are the first box that lets you bake real sourdough breads, fresh pastries, and fresh pasta straight from your freezer. Everything goes from the freezer to the table in 25 minutes or less. There’s no prep, there’s no mess. You can have anything from a perfectly baked croissant to a freshly baked sourdough loaf or one of their seasonal treats like these pumpkin cinnamon biscuits. What makes Wild Grain special is they’re actually made with real ingredients that you can actually pronounce. Their slow fermentation process gives you all the benefits of sourdough, easier on your belly, rich in nutrients, and packed with flavor. They also partner with small bakers and pasta makers across the country, so Every box is supporting local businesses that still bake the old-fashioned way. Look at these biscuits. golden, soft, and just filled with that warm pumpkin cinnamon flavor. It’s the kind of thing that you’d expect from a bakery, but it came straight out of our freezer. If you want to try Wild Green, check the link below and use my code baits for $30 off of your first box, plus free croissants for life. This fall, treat yourself or your family to warm sourdough breads, fresh pastas, and seasonal baked goods from Wild Grain before they’re all gone. And you do that using my code baits for $30 off your first box, plus free croissants for life. Growing up when we do potatoes, my mom would pick our size, you know, if we’re doing a/2 inch dice, we cut them in rounds like this. And I don’t know if any anybody else cuts potatoes like this or not, and then she would stack them up. And it’s a miracle that we survived because this is as dangerous as sin. Now, granted, we didn’t have a lot of sharp knives. You’d stack up as many as you could stack, and then she’d come down and she’d go boom, boom, holding the stacks up. I can’t hold my I’m not as good as my mom was at this. And it worked. We We survived. And all of us, as far as I know, have all of our fingers still, but I’m going to show you how I cut potatoes now. It’s a little bit better of a process. And put some water in this so they don’t brown too much. So, here’s the last two. And that’s how long it took us to cut one potato my mom’s old way. And I’m not picking on my mom. My mom kept us wellfed. And I’m happy for the way she did it. But this may be a little better method. And that is I take my potato, I lay it down, and I cut it in half. Boom. Then I stand my halves up flat. Nothing to wobble. a lot less likely to cut yourself. And then I cut off here however many times I want to cut to get my dice size. And then just come down here and boom, boom, boom. So much faster, so much easier and a lot less risk to cutting yourself. And say I wanted something less. I’ve got this here. I can still cut this when I’m cutting the whole potato. I should have told you, showed you when it was whole. I could have cut it three times across this ways while it was still whole and stacked just each of the slices. So there’s there’s multiple ways around that as well, but it’s just overall a bit safer in my opinion. Again, I’m not a professional, so take anything I say with a grain of salt. Let’s transfer this because I only have one glass bowl and I don’t want to showcase whatever I’m cutting in a metal bowl. It didn’t look as good. So, transferring that. Okay, on to our onion. Now, I cut an onion pretty much every video I’ve realized. For somebody whose kids don’t like onions and for somebody who grew up not eating onions, I sure use onions and everything, but I would way rather use an onion in my opinion than onion powder. Nothing wrong with onion powder, but I just feel you get more quality by using the actual vegetable that the powder came from. It’s like artificial pineapple. It’s just not the same. I will say that cooking help has helped me realize how much flavor actually comes from different ingredients. There’s a lot of these things that bring a lot of flavor to the table that you don’t realize how much onion is actually in everything or how much garlic is in so much. And we’ll use garlic powder in this because that is what the recipe calls for and we’re following theirs exactly. But I don’t think you would be remiss in Well, I’ve messed up. For one, my onions burning for two. This is not my trash bowl. This was supposed to be my bowl for the finished onion and I just filled it up with my trash. There we go. I don’t know where my head is today, but it’s certainly not in the kitchen. Hope I don’t cut myself on camera. That would be horrible. Anyways, cut our onion up here. Got a little scar there. We’ll take that out. It’s not too bad. I’m still surviving that. Okay, done with onion. Going to put a wet paper towel over here to help draw out some of that stuff. Somebody told me about that. That’s the closest trick I’ve found to to doing anything for me. The other ones don’t seem to help that much. Let’s cut our pepper here. And there’s just something about the flavor. Talking about vegetables giving flavor. There’s something about the flavor that a red pepper brings to dishes. I love it. And now I cook all the time with them. And this is something I probably didn’t use that much when I first started cooking. And I didn’t realize how much it could contribute. But if you use paprika, tastes a little different. You’re using red pepper. It’s the dried form of it. And uh a lot of these different things taste so much better with fresh vegetables than you would realize. So, if you did grow up on a lot of canned food in the ‘9s, like I did, feel free to branch out. You might find some things that you like better than the canned versions, making this stuff from scratch. Now, I will say for me, I think the green pepper, red pepper, and the onion all cook about the same amount of time. So often times if I’m using them together, instead of keeping them separate like I would do with onion, shallot, garlic, carrots, celery, things like that, I’ll just go ahead and mix them together and dump them in at the same time, which I think I normally do. My carrots will cook a little longer for me to get the flavor out. I probably went a little bit big with that last one. I probably should have cut a little bit small because I forget these things have to go on a spoon. Sometimes I get in a hurry. Let’s cut these a little bit smaller. Don’t make them super tiny, but I think like if we’re going for 1/2 in dice for the potatoes, probably go for a/4 in dice with the peppers would be a little bit better with the pepper and onion. The onion will cook down a little bit when the water comes out, but the pepper not so much. And I’m pretty sure that that is the prep. Let’s go to the stove top. This is not the utensil to do this with, but it’s right here. So, here I do. We are hot in the middle. Something about this eye. I don’t like the middle cooks hotter than the outside edges. Let’s get this going. Lots of salty ingredients going in this. I’m going to dump in my onions and bell peppers here. I’m going try to be careful with overs salting this. I’ll just put a little bit of salt because I like to salt as I go and we don’t want to mess that up. So, we’ll just do a tiny little bit, right? Cuz we can’t not do it. Of course, a little bit of pepper. Never hurt anybody. Very finely ground there. Now, the recipe says the onions, peppers, and butter for about 3 to 4 minutes. Well, we’ll give them six to eight. Get a little more flavor out of them. That’s not changing the ingredients. That’s not changing the ingredients at all. So, I’m just kind of gently just keeping this moving every little bit so that nothing sticks, but trying to get a little bit of caramelization there. So, if you’ve ever been to Pigeon Forge and you’re looking for just quintessential Appalachin southern home cooking food, The Old Meal would probably have to be my favorite restaurant in the entire Knoxville and surrounding area for just authentically good home cooking. We love Old Meal. We actually used to go for Thanksgiving with Whitney’s family there. And you will literally wait all day on a table. We’d go hang out in Liberty Park for like 3 hours waiting on our table. And that’s it’s just that in demand to be there for Thanksgiving. And if you’ve ever had their turkey and dressing, you’ll know why. It’s exactly like you’d hope mama would make it. And if your mama doesn’t make it like that, I’m sorry. uh their dressing, their uh oh man, I could go on and on about all their different recipes, but they start each entree comes out, it kind of starts with corn chowder. And hence the reason I thought, well, what a great dish to kick off a little bit of fall cooking with with a really good quality corn chowder, which kind of it derives from clam chowder, which is probably more popular, but we don’t have a lot of clams uh around here that I’ve seen recently. In my opinion, if you try this once, you’re going to absolutely fall in love. And you know, I may uh go in through it, look at the technique, questioning like I would do this, I would make a rue first or I would do this first or do this a little different. And I may come back and redo it one day the way I would do it and see what the flavor difference is. But ultimately, this way works because this is the one I like so much I wanted to cook. And I’m going to link that recipe down in my description. I try not to copy and paste other people’s recipes in my description. If they’re down there, I try to just use mine. But I’ll put a link to the Old Mills website. And if you’re ever in Pigeon Forge, go for vacation. Look it up. Also, if you want to purchase a VBO in the Pigeon Forge area or in the Knoxville area, I know a good realtor, me, call me. Now, if you’re to look down at the bottom of my pot right now, you’ll see a little bit of browning. That’s that flavor profile we’re looking for. That’s what we’re want to get in there. And so, now we will go in with our chicken broth. And it says 2 cups of chicken broth. And this is 32 oz. So, we’ll go with about half of this. I mean, if we’re doing real southern cooking, we can’t really use a measuring cup, can we? You just kind of got to guess at everything. Ain’t that the southern way? I’m just kidding. I was too lazy to get a measuring cup out. M. That’s looking good. I may have made my veggies bigger than them. I should have went there and ate again for research purposes to see what size their veggies were cut cuz I think I think I went with two I went with a/2in dice on my potatoes. And I’m feel like I went with a/2in dice on my veggies, too. Should have definitely been a quarter inch dice. That was my bad, folks. But I should have sweated them down a little farther or something. We’ll just have to We’ll just have to go with it. Okay. It’s chunkier than I wanted it to be. That’s my problem. Not Not the old meals. Oh, two cups of water. We will get a measuring cup for that. One cup. Two cups. And then a cup of my clam juice. Where did I put my clam juice? I had to go buy this at the store because I don’t stock clam juice. But this is going to kind of give it a little bit of umami. And I looked at a bunch of different recipes for other creme chowters before I realized that the old meal had theirs, which actually my mom told me. She said, “Why are you looking for recipes for corn chowder? The old meal literally published their recipe.” I said, “Well, I should have thought of that.” So, here we are. Anyways, uh a Oh, that’s 8 o. So, that would be a cup. Don’t need to measure that. Anyways, it adds a little bit of that seafood, that umami, and I reckon pays a little respect to this dish’s origins as a clam chowder. Now, we’ll let that bring that to a bowl and let that cook really good, and then we’ll move to the next step. Let’s see. Stir the single broth, water, clam juice, and potatoes. What? I have messed up. I should be a better reader. I thought it said stirring everything and bring it to a bowl and then stir in the potatoes. It did not. It said bring it to a bowl with the potatoes. Let me drain my potatoes here. So, I was supposed to bring this to a bowl with my potatoes. Let’s bring it back to a bowl a second time. We do things nice because we do them twice. Here we go. Stir in my potatoes. Now, you absolutely know that you are doing some serious authentic southern cooking. Whenever a recipe tells you to smash up some cracker crumbs, I don’t know what it is about southern cuisine. Make a rude. No, let’s smash in some cracker crumbs to thicken this sucker at the end. And somehow that is a thing. So, we’re going to get about 3/4 of a cup of cracker crumbs. And I have to really get these fine because I want them to thicken this soup. And this is the only thing that I probably would do differently, I thought. But it’s the way they do it and it tasted great. So, we’re going to do it like this. And they didn’t tell me how crumbly to crumble. So, I’m thinking really fine because we’re using this to thicken the soup and I don’t want a bunch of salty cracker pieces in there. I don’t want them super lumpy. kind of freaked myself out a little bit here. I thought I had really messed up because I looked in this and I said, “Wait a minute. There’s no corn in this chowder.” So, I had to go look at the recipe again and see what am I missing here. But, you don’t put the corn in until later. I’m going to stir in our crackers and a little bit of flour. How much flour was that, Zach? 1/4 cup of Miller’s Choice. They have their own version of flour that they grind right there. It’s an unbleached flour with nothing in it there. I think I probably should have crushed my saltines more, but overall, this is looking pretty good. Let’s see how this does. Flour, salt, pepper, garlic powder. Praise the Lord, we’ve got some spices that go in here. Little bit of onion powder. Probably too much, but who really cares? Little bit of garlic powder. That’s about a pinch, I reckon. Salt. Now, it’s got a really chowdery look. We’re just missing the corn. This is looking good. This is looking good. Starting to make me hungry now. This is what you This is what you come to the store for. Let’s get a little coarser ground. Got super fine grind on that stuff. This grinder gets it as thinner. Oh yeah. Everything’s better with pepper. Now this is looking like a winning dish. Ah, smell that pepper. That’s what makes this stuff good. Oh yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. I feel like I just took a trip to Pigeon Forge. So we’ve got that. It’s come up. Put in the corn. Half of this corn. That look about like two cups then. Feels like two cups to me. Yeah. Put a little extra in for good measure. It is corn chowder, you know. Two cups of half and half. This is a quart. So, half of this. I love when something’s like two two cups or something like that because I can easily guess that measurement. Feels about right. Now, that’s interesting. The milk hit that corn and froze. It was loose a second ago. Welcome to the old meal in downtown Pigeon Forge. You have arrived at your destination. All right, my people. We have the goodness. Look at this steam right here. I live for those moments. I don’t know if you can see that on camera or not, but I hope you can. If not, I can tell you it was it was glorious. Little sprinkle of black pepper because these things were made for a little black pepper bite. And now we have the dish I’ve been waiting for. Corn chowder. I can’t remember if the old meal uses oyster crackers or saltine crackers, but in my opinion, oyster crackers look fancier. And it is a chowder and it does have clam juice in it, so that’s what we’re going with. But regardless, this right here is an absolute winner. It is a southern staple. It is home cooking extraordinaire and it’s one of my favorite dishes at the old meal. That is exactly that is exactly like of course it would be. It’s their recipe, but it’s exactly like a bowl of corn chowder right at the old meal. I can see myself sitting there and the river coming by. It it is so good that I can feel it. This will take you home. One bite. You’re going to thank me later. I can feel it.