Quick, Easy Corny Skillet Cornbread – with Recipe

Tip o’ the Day: (recipe follows) Always preheat your oven to 25-50°F higher than the recipe calls for, then turn it down. You’ll lose 25-30 degrees of heat when you open it and patchke around getting the pan in and out. And most breads (and many pastries) do well with a strong burst of initial heat anyway.

Wanted to get a picture of this before it was too late, but… well, it was almost too late.  That’s how good this was with our chili tonight!

This really is one of the few recipes I’d say would be completely different without a cast-iron skillet. I have made cornbread in pans and it’s lovely… but there is something awesomely crispy about cornbread baked in butter on preheated cast-iron.  Given that my soul-food diet precludes bacon, I tell myself that this deep, hearty crunch and this corny cornbread’s crunchy sweet / savoury crust is the next best thing.  Or really quite special in its own right, depending on if you’re a glass-half-full or glass-half-empty kind of person.

Special equipment:

• 9” cast-iron skillet (mine was cheap secondhand from Value Village, kashered in my oven’s self-clean cycle)
• Optional: a little silicone handle doohickey like this one makes life REALLY good when transferring a hot cast-iron skillet to or from the oven
• Optional: and I cannot tell you how much better life got with a nice pair of oven gloves… (not mitts; gloves!)

The Dry Stuff:

Whisk together thoroughly in a large bowl and set aside:

• 1 1/4 cups cornmeal
• 3/4 cup all-purpose flour
• 1/4 cup (or a bit less) granulated sugar
• 1 tsp table salt
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp baking soda

The Wet Stuff:

• 1/3 cup milk (whole milk is nice, but I used 2%)
• 1 cup yogurt (regular, not Greek!) (if you don’t have yogurt, mix 1 cup of milk with 1-2 tsp of lemon juice / vinegar added – stir and allow 5 minutes to curdle and thicken slightly)
• 2 eggs, slightly beaten
• 1 stick (= 8 tbsp) unsalted butter
• 1 can (341 ml, 12 oz) corn kernels, drained

1. Preheat oven to 450°F.  While preheating, melt butter in oven in a 9-inch cast iron skillet (about 5 minutes). 
2. When butter is melted (even if oven’s not all the way hot), remove from oven and pour into a bowl to cool slightly.
3. In a measuring cup or small bowl, stir the milk, yogurt (or soured milk), and eggs together well. Stir in slightly cooled melted butter.  Mix well.
4. Make a well in the middle of the dry stuff in the large bowl.  Pour wet stuff into the well in the dry stuff.  Pour in corn kernels now, too.
5. Stir a few times just until moistened.  Do not overmix!
6. Carefully remove hot skillet from the oven (hint:  use your silicone handle doohickey if you have one!).
7. Pour batter into the skillet - place it in the center of the oven.
8. Reduce oven temperature to 425°F.
9. Bake until centre is firm and a cake tester, skewer or toothpick inserted into the centre comes out clean.  For me, this was 25 minutes.
10. Turn out immediately (use the doohickey!) onto a cooling rack.  If your pan is well-seasoned and you melted the butter in it ahead of time, it should just fall out with no sticking.  Yay for cast iron!
11. If you’re the patient type, allow to cool 10 to 15 minutes before serving.
12. Yum!

When you can’t have bread…

(because we just had amazing garlic bread at my mother’s house last night!)

… then have bread on TOP of your regular supper!!!

In this case, chili, with cornbread on top.  Always a hit, but this could easily be made with this quick n’ easy beer bread instead. 

The chili around here is usually pareve, so I used milk in the cornbread; if the chili had meat, you could just use water – if I’m using tinned corn, I’ll save the corn water and use that – or some pareve kind of milk, but I don’t adore pareve milks in baking.

Use any chili you want:  homemade, storebought, whatever – just make sure it’s very moist, or you’ll be gasping for liquids as you eat it, because the cornbread sucks up some of the liquid, while baking evaporates some.  Lose-lose, so start with a very wet chili.

The cornbread on top is adapted from the Joy of Cooking, and I usually double it, because we love it like crazy and one batch just isn’t enough:

Ingredients

3/4 cup cornmeal

1 tablespoon flour

1 tablespoon sugar

1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1 tsp regular, not kosher, salt

1 egg

1/3 cup milk

1 tablespoon vegetable oil

(April 22/13, made this again today and realized it doesn’t have salt in it; the original recipe may have omitted it, but I recommend a tsp of salt)

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 425°.
2. Pour prepared chili into a 9x13 pan – make sure there’s enough room on top for the cornbread mixture.  Put a baking sheet underneath if you think it might overflow.  Ask me how I know this!  (see pic above – there is NO room; I had to divide this chili into 2 tinfoil pans)
3. Combine dry ingredients well in a bowl.
4. Combine wet ingredients well in a measuring cup.
5. Pour wet ingredients over dry ingredients.
6. Stir gently ONLY until combined – not a second longer.  I use a rubber spatula for this step so as not to overmix.
7. “Plop” cornbread mixture hither and thither, in evenly spaced blobs, all over the chili.  Don’t worry if it starts to sink a bit; it will rise during baking.
8. Bake at 425° until cornbread is brown, about 20-25 minutes.

In case you’re curious, here’s  a rough breakdown of the chili itself, because it’s very easy:

• 2 tins of kidney beans, drained and rinsed (hint: open upside-down; they’re easier to drain that way)
• 1 tin of diced tomatoes
• 1 packet of taco seasoning (we use Ortega)
• 1 big purple onion, diced
• 2 carrots, cubed
• red pepper, diced, if desired
• Garlic, as much as you can stand
• Tinned or frozen corn, ditto
• Any other veg you want to include
• Tofu, TVP, whatever you want to boost the protein / texture
• Tin Cream of Tomato soup, or not, whatever you want

Instructions

1. In a large pot, fry onion in oil.
2. Add carrots, fry till slightly softened.
3. Add red pepper, ditto.
4. Add kidney beans, ditto.
5. Add garlic and mix well.
6. Add taco seasoning and mix well.
7. Add tomatoes.
8. Add 1-2 cups of water, as desired
9. Add frozen or tinned corn.
10. Add Cream of Tomato soup, if using.
11. Stir well and bring to a boil.
12. Cover and simmer 20-30 minutes, until flavours are well-combined.  Add chili powder, cumin, cilantro, or anything else to add authenticity, or just leave it the way it is if you’re feeding little kids.
13. Serve on its own, with cornbread – or, better still, with cornbread ON TOP!!!

Sourdough Cornbread Math for Vegan Night

Once again, I am happy and amazed that bread – even the BEST breads – can be made not only pareve, but also completely vegan.  That’s because I have declared “Vegan Vursdays” and tonight, we are hoping to have bread with soup – a classic combination that’s perfect for a day like today.

I found this recipe for Sourdough Corn Bread that looked good (though I might not go so far as to shape it into bread bowls), except it calls for starter at 100% hydration.  The starter that I’ve been building up all week is more of a stiff starter (I estimated 50, but that’s probably not right, either).

At The Fresh Loaf, I found this primer explaining the math of how to convert recipes to use a stiffer or thinner starter, but it started giving me a headache.

So – always my father’s child! - I broke it down using a spreadsheet.  You just plug in:

• quantity of starter called for, at what hydration
• flour and water quantities from the recipe
• how much starter you HAVE, at what hydration

And it does the math:  how much extra flour or water to add (or remove) to/from the recipe to obtain hopefully similar consistency.

Here’s what it came up with! 

I used my updated quantity of flour, but only about 425g total water instead of almost 500g.  The original recipe says to hold back some of the water, and I’m glad I did.  The corn flour / cornmeal may have had something to do with this, because it absorbs water differently.

I actually didn’t have what I’d consider corn FLOUR – what is that, anyway?  But I had Bob’s Red Mill stone-ground cornmeal, which contains the bits that are usually not included in cornmeal, so I think it’s roughly equivalent, if quite a bit grittier.  When it comes to cornbread, I don’t mind gritty.

Took some kneading to work in the starter completely.  If I hadn’t been so discombobulated today, and had the luxury of time, I probably would have broken it up more and maybe even stirred it well into the water before I started.  But I eventually got it evenly distributed into the dough:

What I ended up with is a very moist dough that should benefit from a couple of stretch and fold operations in the next hour before I actually shape it into loaf/loaves (haven’t decided yet on the final portioning/shaping).

Wish me luck!!!  It’s been a terrible day in almost every other way… at the very least, I deserve good bread.  Right?