Wednesday, May 7, 2008

Cornbread!

Since leaving the south, I've really fallen in love with all things southern. Cornbread, black beans, bad country music (just caught glimpses of it on movies), driving nowhere, the lot. I'm constantly in search of the perfect cornbread recipe. Now, with cornbread, there's sweet and there's salty. I usually only have the ingredients around for a sweet cornbread, so that's the one I've been working on. I won't call this recipe perfect, but it ain't bad.



Makes precisely 12 muffins or 1 brownie pan.

Dry Ingredients:
1 cup corn flour or meal (actually, I used 175ml gluten free corn flour and 75ml vital wheat gluten to balance it out. What can I say? I'm an improviser.)
1 tsp (heaping) baking powder
1 tsp (heaping) salt

Wet Ingredients:
1 cup soymilk + 1tsp apple cider or other light vinegar
1/2 cup sugar
4 Tb buttah

Instructions:

  • Preheat oven to 350°F/ 175°C. Actually, I usually do this right before I mix the wet and dry ingredients together because I take forever.
  • Grease your pan! Unless you're using cupcake liners. Here's my method: pour a teensy tiny bit of oil in each muffin crevice. Get a paper towel, stick it in a bit of your buttah (I grab, very approximately, a 1/2 Tb), and spread that around with your oil. Also make sure to get the top of the pan, where the batter isn't supposed to go, but inevitably ends up. This gets things nicely greased and makes for easier cleaning. You don't even need to spread messy flour over the top.
  • Stir together soymilk and vinegar and set aside.
  • In a large bowl, beat together sugar and buttah until smooth.
  • In a smaller bowl, combine dry ingredients. I like to whisk mine together.
  • Add the now curdled soymilk and the dry ingredients in the the butter mixture and mix until just combined.
  • Fill the crevises or brownie pan until 1/3 of the way full
  • If muffins, bake 20min until a toothpick comes out clean. If bread, like in a brownie tin, bake approx. 30min until a knife or toothpick comes out clean.

This still needs some tweaking. I'm going to try adding baking soda next time and see if I like them fluffier. as is, they're more cup-cakey. Could be the funny flour combo, though.

5 comments:

Regina said...

It's been a long time since I made cornbread. I think I used baking soda, and made it sweet. I substituted applesauce for oil, too. I got the recipe off the cornbread box/cylinder.

Cam said...

Sweet cornbread alwayss seemed sort of a South Carolina/Virginia concoction. The Alabama kind was nice and grainy and tasted best with sonme honey or good old cane syrup.

And you are right; it needs to be very light insteaad of heavy and dense.

Rachel said...

these are good cornbread suggestions. I will, one day, make the perfect one. I myself prefer the grainy kind that needs buttah and honey on it. healthy subs for oil are also good, but tricky with heaviness and liquid content.

Cam said...

Cornbread is certainly better with bacon drippings but I relize the importance of changing to other forms of halthy subs. A cook in Sissy's family'shousehold made corncakes (hoecakes) that were so greeasy they were almost impossible to eat. I think she did not have her pan or her "deep fat" hot enough. My old Pentagon boss loved them and Sissy's mother thought they were MY favorites so I got them frequently when we visited.

Cam said...

dhxtjoI think I had a key stuck on one of my vowels in that last transmission.