This Saturday was quite a busy day. I had just finished making my first Julia Child recipe, Reine de Saba, a wonderful chocolate cake, the night before. That day, we went on an epik trek across town. That evening, we were making some Detroit-style chili for our friend's birthday. I knew I would need a quick, easy recipe so as not to get in the way in the kitchen. Although the chili was the kind you put on a hot dog and not the kind you eat like a stew, cornbread seemed to be a good thing at any time. Maybe that's just the southerner in me.
Now I am pretty particular about my cornbread. I hate the dry, tasteless, crumbly stuff like you'd get at Cracker Barrel. I like my cornbread sweet like the Jiffy kind. I expected this recipe to be a lot sweeter, but it was really very middle of the road. The real flavor didn't develop until the next day, when it had a chance to really cool down and rest. Ever since moving to Cincinnati, I've fallen in love with corn pudding. A local "Mexican" restaurant, Don Pablo, makes it wonderfully, and I was expecting something like that due to the amount of corn in this recipe.
I'd say the cornbread ended up somewhere between the two. It wasn't terribly sweet, but it certainly wasn't dry or tasteless. The bacon and corn gave it much more oomph that a Jiffy mix. Due to the busy kitchen and the ensuing disaster of trying to put an insanely tough beef heart through a meat grinder, I didn't manage to take many pictures.
The mixture started out with a cornbread soaker. This time, instead of water, it soaked in buttermilk. Since I didn't have any, I had to put some lemon juice in milk and let it sour as a substitute. I then proceeded to mix my dry and wet ingredients separately. The dry ingredient were flour (all-purpose, finally!), baking powder, baking soda, salt, sugar and brown sugar. The wet ingredients were eggs, honey, butter and the soaker. These were all mixed together nicely then filled to the brim with corn.
By this point, I had baked the bacon in the oven and collected the drippings. A portion of these drippings were put in the pan and heated in the oven, then rolled around in the pan as a coating. The batter was then poured in, and bacon was distributed across the top. This went into the oven for what seemed like forever. I just couldn't get the middle to bake.
Finally, everything managed to set perfectly. The outside was just crusty enough to be bread-like, with the inside tender and creamy enough to be cake-like. The bacon didn't really crisp much, but I don't like it rock hard, so it was great as well. I actually left it uncovered for the two or three days it managed to survive being devoured, and it just kept getting better.
This really wasn't a hard recipe. Besides preparing the soaker the night before, which takes all of two minutes, the bread could be completely finished in well under an hour. I'm not sure if I'll give up my Jiffy standby, as it really hits my sweet tooth, but this is an excellent compromise between the cake-like variety and the more hearty bread-like kind, and would be perfect with a nice thick stew-like chili.
My next bread will be baked in Huntsville, and I'll actually be pretty hands off on it. I'll be visiting my friend Lora, and I'm going to make her experience the joy of baking bread. We'll probably do either a simple white or wheat bread, as they're a great place to start, but we may do something more complicated, should the mood strike her.
Cornbread? Check.
Next up? Who knows...
No comments:
Post a Comment