Cornbread Challenge: Traditional Southern Cornbread

Now, northern-style cornbread is all well and good, and if you're interested, certainly check out Ben's post on the subject. However, southern cornbread is about purity and clarity. Southern cornbread is meant to be nothing more nor less than a celebration of the simple joy of corn. Also: bacon fat.

The cornbread we are making today is traditional. And, because I'm a little crazy about these things, I mean seriously traditional. No flour. No cooking in butter nor vegetable oil nor shortening. Use of a cast iron skillet. When I say traditional, I mean it. To start, preheat the oven to 450°F.

Like the previous corn bread recipe, traditional southern corn bread is assembled using the muffin method. This is a simple method and worth learning, so put some effort towards this: whisk the dry ingredients together. Add in the wet ingredients. Just barely combine. Cook.

The only vaguely fiddly bit of the muffin method is the "just barely combine" part. This is so that you don't develop extra gluten from the liquids mixing with the flour. However, we have no flour today, so you could stir it for hours and not have any ill effect beyond your milk curdling.

For our cornbread, we have the dry ingredients consisting of cornmeal, baking powder, and salt:

For the wet ingredients, we have eggs and buttermilk:

Did I mention earlier that I took things seriously with this challenge? That means, as you may have guessed, that I made a batch of butter for this primarily so that I could use the buttermilk in the recipe. So above you see (mostly) AYFS Buttermilk. I say mostly because I was a tablespoon short, so I added a bit of regular buttermilk to make up for it. You could instead add regular milk or even water.

Incidentally, the last time I made butter, it was a bit of a mess, and Ben suggested that I wrap the top of the mixer outside of the bowl with plastic wrap. So I did.

We need some fat to finish this up. Butter would seem ideal here, but there are two problems with that. First, we need some for the pan, which will get very hot and will burn the butter. Second, this is tradtitional southern cornbread, which means that we use pig fat. If you have lard, great, otherwise use some bacon fat. I didn't have either handy, so I rendered down some bacon fat of my own. We have a butcher locally that makes some fantastically smoky bacon.

Rendering fat from bacon is like cooking bacon, but at a slightly lower temperature to encourage the bacon fat to melt rather than brown. I took 2 tablespoons of the bacon drippings and used the rest of it (which wasn't much) to coat the inside of the cast iron pan to prevent sticking.

I combined all of the ingredients together to get:

Although my pan was warm from the bacon, it needs to be really hot. Stick it in that preheated oven for 4 minutes. Take it out (with your most serious of heat resistant hand guards, it is very hot) and pour in your cornbread. You will hear the sound of something frying, and you see bubbles come up through your batter.

Now put it into the oven and cook for about 20 minutes. What you're looking for is a light browning on the top and browning around the edges.

Now, the trickiest part of this whole recipe: taking it out of the pan. I have some relatively heat-proof gloves (the thick silicone kind, and a more fabric-y glove), but if you hold the pan for too long while it's hot, it will eventually make it through to your hand. So start by ensuring that nothing is sticking to the edges of your pan by taking a butter knife around it. Then flip the cornbread out onto a cooling rack. I had to hit the bottom of my pan a couple of times to get it out, but if your pan is seasoned better than mine, you probably won't have that problem. It should look something like this when you're done:

Garnish with some butter and revel in the corn flavor. Because my bacon was so smokey, there was a good deal of smokey favor in the cornbread as well.

Traditional Southern Cornbread

Ingredients

2 Cups cornmeal

3 Tablespoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 Eggs, beaten

2 Cups buttermilk

2 Tablespoons rendered bacon fat or lard, plus extra to coat pan.

Directions

Preheat oven to 450°F.

Whisk together cornmeal, baking powder, and salt.

Add eggs, buttermilk, and bacon grease to cornmeal mixture. Stir to combine.

Thoroughly coat inside of pan with bacon grease or lard. Put in pre-heated oven for 4 minutes.

Remove pan from oven, pour batter in, and cook in oven for 20 minutes or until top is lightly browned.

Cool on cooling rack.

Comments

[Elizabeth]

Now *that's* cornbread. Thank you.

[Brian]

I do my best. You are quite welcome.

[Genna]

Hi, I'm Genna, Brian's recently acquired assistant. I am testing recipes for "A Year from Scratch," and I was so happy to start with this one. Breakfast is so much better when it involves bacon, especially when the fat rendered from this bacon becomes an ingredient in cornbread, which is (of course) also eaten for breakfast.

I made the cornbread this morning. All went well, except I misconstrued the part where Brian indicated that you can replace the last tablespoon or so of buttermilk with regular milk or water. Maybe I made the mistake because it was really early in the morning and I was in a rush to make this cornbread, but I ended up using 2% milk. I added 1 cup and it looked like the right consistency, but after adding the bacon fat it seemed like it needed a little more liquid so I added another 1/4 cup. I decided to not add the last 3/4 cup because it would have been way too watery. The cornbread came out pretty good, although I'm sure that adding two cups of buttermilk would have made a moister product. I hope I have time to make it again with buttermilk, after which I will let everyone know what I think of it.

It was amazing to see the result of cornbread baked in a cast iron pan. It ended up being so tasty with butter, as mentioned, but I also tried it with honey (fabulous), strawberry jam (obvs fab), and fig jam (worked the best because fig always pairs well with smokiness, i.e., prosciutto).

[meg]

Oooh...smitten, I am. Thank you.