We had a snow day last week here in New York, so we took the opportunity to stay warm inside and do some cooking. We decided to try a recipe that we’ve had saved up for a couple months, which was comforting on a cold, snowy day: cornbread.
We know, we know, people think that Northerners can’t really make good cornbread. While it’s true that the best cornbread we’ve ever had was in the South, we decided to test out this recipe from Bon Appetit, putting our own twist on it to make it vegetarian. Here’s what we used:
- Cornmeal
- Sugar (yes, we’re aware that there’s a lot of controversy about sugar in cornbread, but darn it we wanted to use sugar)
- Salt
- Baking powder
- Baking soda
- An egg
- Buttermilk
- Vegetable oil
- A stick of butter
- Chives
The very first thing we did, which the recipe recommends, is to preheat our oven to 450°F and place a large cast iron skillet inside while the oven is heating up.
Then we measured out 2 cups of cornmeal, 2 tablespoons of sugar, a teaspoon of salt, 1/2 teaspoon of baking powder and 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda and whisked everything together.
In a separate bowl, we whisked together the egg with 1 1/2 cups of buttermilk.
Then we mixed everything together with a wooden spoon.
Once the oven was fully heated we took the skillet out, poured in about a tablespoon of oil, and used a pastry brush to coat the bottom of the skillet in the oil. Then we poured our cornbread mixture into the skillet and baked everything for 15-20 minutes, until the cornbread was golden on top.
Once the cornbread came out of the oven and was cooling down, we melted the entire stick of butter in the microwave and then mixed it with a handful of chopped chives. Then we poured the butter and chives over the cornbread as a topping.
And then it was ready to slice up and eat! If you’ve ever suffered through a batch of dry cornbread, the butter here helped in making our final product nice and moist. The chives added a nice flavor on top, and yes, we do believe that adding sugar made it more tasty. You can see that this was a really easy recipe to make, so we recommend giving it a try when you want some simple comfort food to warm you up.