In Search of the Perfect Cornbread

I am thinking about doing an article on cornbread. I love good cornbread. I grew up on cornbread and beans. My Mother and Aunt Marylou cooked a lot of beans and cornbread when all of us kids were growing up. They had both cooked for my Dad and Uncle who had been Loggers Gold Run, CA before moving to Meridian. They knew how to cook for a crew of loggers, and do it on a budget. My mother used the recipe on the back of the Alber's box. She doubled the recipe and then baked it in a big sheet broiler pan. It made the cornbread about 1 inch thick. It was not cake like, it was sturdier. You could slice it into two 1/2 inch thins and still it would hold up to butter, honey or jam.

I had a good friend growing up who's Dad was from Louisiana and his Mom was from Oklahoma. His Mom made cornbread very different from my Mom. She did it in a cast iron skillet and it was thicker, more cake like, and as I remember more white on top. I always thought that was because she may have used more flour than corn meal. I also suspect that the recipe may have included some bacon grease or lard. I have reached out to my friends big sister and asked if she might still have that recipe.

I took a cornbread over to my friend A.J. Hyatt one day when his wife was away visiting family. I think he was thankful for the jesture, but he made the comment that he really liked his cornbread sweeter. He is from the area around Oklahoma, Arkansas and NE Texas. I am going to see if I can get a recipe from him as well.

Last Christmas my son Blair and Nephew Casey were talking about cook-offs. I think it was Blair who said he made the best cornbread and we should do a cornbread coook-off. For the last 20 years or so, I have been experimenting with different recipes of cornbread. I have tried many different mixes and recipes over the years. Twenty Five years ago when I was visiting Virginia on a regular basis, I bought a Virgina cookbook that had a interesting recipe for "Plantation Cornbread". Actually, most recipes are very similar. This one however used milk with a couple of tablespoons of lemon juice added. the lemon juice separates the milk. The recipe also calls for butter and not just oil. For many years, I used vegetable oil thinking that it would be more healthy than 6T of butter. I was never really happy with it because the cornbread always fell apart. I like my cornbread to stay together enough to put some butter and honey on it and still be able to pick it up and eat it. The butter seems to improve the texture and durability of the cornbread.

I started experimenting with grinding my own corn for cornbread. I would buy whole grain corn for human consumption on the internet and grind it with my Kitchen Aid grain mill. I like my cornbread to be more gritty than cake-like. I found that you could certainly get it too coarse and gritty. I finally got it right. Then I realized how much trouble it was to buy the corn, grind it and store it. I began to look at commercially available higher end corn meal. I have been using Bob's Red Mill Medium Grind corn meal. It has a little more coarse grind than Albers, but not too coarse as to be overly gritty.

This last month, I started looking at other recipes and noticed that most of them include buttermilk. It began to make sense why in my Virginia cookbook, they were adding an acid to the milk to curdle it. It seems that that the acid of the buttermilk (or lemon juice) contribute to the chemical action of the baking powder and baking soda in the baking. I really can't tell the difference in the taste between milk and lemon juice and buttermilk. I don't keep buttermilk, and I do have a lemon tree in my yard, so I default to the milk and lemon juice.

The other variable that I have been experimenting with is the fat. I really think the use of butter over vegetable oil, not only changes the flavor, but really changes the consistency and texture for the better. I am going to also try adding some bacon fat and see what that does to the taste. I already know what it will do to my heart.

My plan is to start acquiring recipes and bake up a bunch of cornbreads in the search for my perfect cornbread. Stay Tuned, we might even have a cornbread cook-off in our future.

If anyone happens to find this obscure blog site and wants to contribute a recipe for their favorite cornbread, email it to me at t.tomlinson54@gmail.com. I will bake it up and see how it measures up.

More to come!