Some people buy cornbread mix — can you believe it? If you’re used to scratchin’ it the way we are, your eyes are about ready to pop out of your skull and land on the floor right about now. If not, fasten your seatbeat, ‘cuz we’re about to scratch up some cornbread.
Cornbread or Cornsticks
Ingredients
- 3/4 cup yellow cornmeal
- 1 1/4 cup all-purpose flour
- 1/4 cup sugar
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 2 tsp baking powder
- 1 cup buttermilk
- 1/4 cup light oil like canola
- 2 Tbs minced onion optional
- 2 tsp minced jalapenos optional
Instructions
- Grease corn-stick pans. Or a medium sized cast-iron skillet, or an 8×8-inch baking pan.
- Preheat oven to 400°F. If you’re using cast-iron, put it in the oven to heat, too.
- Mix all the dry ingredients together.
- Mix in the liquid ingredients.
- Fill the pans. And bake around 15-20 minutes. The cornbread will puff and brown just a bit on top.
Ingredient discussion:
We happen to use scratched buttermilk, and you should, too. It’s the easiest thing to make and cheaper than buying that stuff with thickeners, salt, and other who-haw you don’t need. We’ll show you how to, soon.
Procedure in detail:
UPDATE: We just learned a technique to make your cornbread even better: use polenta (coarser cornmeal) in place of standard cornmeal, and soak it in the buttermilk overnight. You can read the details right here: Improved Corn Bread.
Grease corn-stick pans. Or a medium sized cast-iron skillet, or an 8×8-inch baking pan. Preferably the former, since the amount we’ll make will fill two large corn-stick pans and two small corn-stick pans. We only have one large, so we have to bake twice.
Preheat oven to 400°F. If you’re using cast-iron, put it in the oven to heat, too. This will help ensure crispaliciousness.
Mix all the dry ingredients together. There’s your cornbread mix that comes in a box. Now you know why our eyes pop at the though of someone actually buying cornbread mix. Your eyes are popping, too; we can see them.
Mix in the liquid ingredients. That’s right, for this recipe, onion bits are liquid, same with jalapenos. Just mix it all together.
Fill the pans. And bake around 15-20 minutes. The cornbread will puff and brown just a bit on top.
Remove from the pan, and enjoy fresh, hot, scratched cornbread.
Five stars, since this is the only way we have cornbread. It’s just too easy to bother with a mix.