#70 - Cornbread

Cornbread is delicious. If you want to eat cornbread as often as possible (and who doesn't?), you have to know how to make it yourself. Here's our shot at it.

Cornbread

From The New York Times We like our cornbread to be more on the sweet side rather than savory, and so we scoured the Internet for recipes and finally settled on this one from The New York Times. To get started, you melt some butter in the pan you're going to cook the whole thing in, and then you start mixing the cornmeal and other dry ingredients. You add some eggs and milk, and then you pour the batter into the melted butter. Then you put the whole thing in the oven for half an hour. Overall, this recipe was pretty good. The original recipe called for 1/4 to 1/2 cup sugar, and we went with the half cup, and it still wasn't as sweet as it could have been. It was also a little grittier than we'd like, and that might have had to do with the choice of cornmeal. So while it may not be the best cornbread we've ever had, it was still tasty, and maybe we could learn to adjust it a bit to make it just right. If you want to try cornbread at home, this deserves a shot.

Ingredients

• 4 Tbs butter, softened
• 1 1/2 cups medium-grind cornmeal
• 1/2 cup flour
• 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp salt
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 1/4 cups milk, more if needed

Preparation

1. Preheat oven to 375.
2. Put butter in an 8-inch square baking pan, and place pan in oven.
3. Meanwhile, combine dry ingredients in a bowl.
4. Mix eggs into milk, then stir this mixture into dry ingredients, combining with a few swift strokes.
5. If mixture seems dry, add another Tbs or two of milk.
6. When butter and oven are hot, remove pan from oven.
7. Pour batter into pan and smooth out top.
8. Return pan to oven, and bake until top is lightly browned and sides have pulled away from pan, about 30 minutes.
9. Remove from oven and serve hot.