Most excellent cornbread
Cornbread is not too hard to make from scratch, and it’s one of those nice things where a lot of times the Jiffy mix tastes just as good as any homemade recipe you can come up with. But this recipe is really worth trying. It comes from Mark Bittman (big surprise there), but I have made some very slight changes.
- 1 and 1/4 cup buttermilk. I never have buttermilk around the house, so I use 1 and 1/4 cups regular milk or soy milk, warm it up in the microwave for 1 minute, and then pour 1 tbsp. white vinegar into it to sour.
- 2 tbsp butter, earth balance, or olive oil
- 1 cup fine to medium grind cornmeal
- 1/2 cup polenta or some other slightly larger grind cornmeal
- 1/2 cup all purpose flour
- 1 and 1/2 tsp baking powder
- 1 tsp salt
- 1 tbsp sugar
- 1 egg
Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Make the buttermilk as I mention above and set aside. Mix the dry ingredients together in a bowl. Place the butter in the dish you’re going to use to cook the bread; as you can see from the photo, I use an 8x8 pan. Put this pan over medium-low heat on the stove and melt the butter. Heat it until the butter is melted but not burned. Heat for about 2 minutes and then turn off the burner. Mix the egg into the buttermilk and then combine with the dry ingredients. Mix everything until combined. Pour the batter into the melted butter. The butter will flee to the sides which is just fine. Bake for about 30 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.
The melting butter trick will make the sides and bottom of the cornbread all buttery and crispy and delightful. Feel free to use a little less butter if that kind of freaks you out, but you still want the crispy sides.
