This delicious cornbread recipe is more of crumbly sweet cornbread than the average dry brick that you might get at the store or a box mix. This recipe for cornbread is sure to be your new favorite.
Homemade Cornbread
There is nothing like homemade cornbread. This recipe, like many of the others I have, is based on my memories of what cornbread should taste like: moist, crumbly, and slightly sweet with a loose texture. My mother made cornbread on a regular basis, and I occasionally helped her in the preparation. Her recipe was something that she had developed after testing several others from her cookbook collection. It was a wonderful crumbly sweet cornbread that paired perfectly with a bowl of chili and was just as tasty on its own slathered in butter and maybe drizzled in honey. This became the cornbread that all cornbread would be judged against.
Though I love me some Jiffy cornbread, it just couldn’t hold up and no other box or store cornbread was going to work for me either. I needed my own homemade cornbread recipe that was just as wonderful as my mother’s. This cornbread recipe uses a lot more butter than many other recipes, and it also requires that the butter be cut into the dry ingredients. I do this specifically because this is how I remember my mother doing it, and so this is what I am doing as well.
How to Make Cornbread
This recipe was adapted from the Betty Crocker Cookbook: 1500 Recipes for the Way You Cook Today.
“Cornbread.” Betty Crocker Cookbook: 1500 Recipes for the Way You Cook Today, Houghton Mifflin, New York, NY, 2013, p. 105.
Ingredients
- 1 cup whole milk
- ½ cup butter, cold and cut into pieces + extra
- 1 egg
- 1 cup yellow corn meal
- ¼ cup dry polenta
- 1 cup all-purpose flour
- ½ cup sugar
- ½ teaspoon baking soda
- ½ teaspoon baking powder
- Pinch of salt
Instructions
- Heat the oven to 400°F. Butter and flour the inside of a 9” round cake pan or 8” square brownie pan. Set aside.
- In a large bowl, combine the dry ingredients together.
- Cut the butter into the dry ingredients either by hand, with a fork, or with a pastry tool until a rough crumb has formed.
- Add in the wet ingredients and mix with a wooden spoon until just combined.
- Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake for 20 to 25 minutes or until a clean knife or toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean and the top of the cornbread is golden brown.
- Slice and serve warm. Goes deliciously with butter, honey, maple syrup, or Beef Crockpot Chili.
Enjoy!
