At Putt Wetherbee’s house, there’s always a bowl of roasted-and-salted pecans at the ready. “I never tire of them,” says Wetherbee, the fifth-generation owner of Schermer Pecans in Thomasville, Georgia. It’s no surprise that he’s nuts for the nuts—his family has grown them for more than 150 years—or that he’s always looking for clever new ways to use them in recipes, beyond the expected pralines or pecan pie. “You find pecans in rice recipes all of the time—one of my favorites is cold wild rice with pecans,” he says. “So, why not pair them with grits?” He worked with the Charleston, South Carolina, recipe developer Jenni Lata to get the details of this resulting recipe for pecan grits exactly right. “It tastes like fall in a bowl,” Wetherbee says. “It just blew us away.”
