Honey Buttermilk Cornbread 5/5 Spoons

(Check out that chili. Gahhhh, so good.)

So, I've made an obscene amount of cornbread in the last few years. Today I made Whole Foods Vegetarian Chili (which is by far my favorite chili ever) and made my own cornbread to go with it. I feel confident enough to make cornbread and pizza dough without a recipe anymore. I've made cornbread before but this one is better, trust me. And this recipe is like really not that bad for you which is a bonus. Here is my recipe:

1 c. all-purpose flour (I might try bread flour next time, we shall see)
1. coarse cornmeal
2 t. baking powder
1/2 t. kosher salt
1 c. buttermilk
1/4 c. honey
1/4 c. extra virgin olive oil (or any oil of your choosing)
1 egg

Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Grease a 9-inch pie/cake pan or line a 12 cup muffin pan.

Add all dry ingredients (through salt) into a large bowl and whisk until combined. In another bowl or measuring cup combine all wet ingredients and whisk. Add wet to dry and mix until combined but not beyond that. It will be thick like a cake batter. Add batter to the pan and place in top 1/3 of your oven. Bake for 15-20 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean or when you press the top it is firm yet yielding. Let cool for a few minutes and then turn out onto a cooling rack. This is great warm or cold. Wrap your leftovers in some aluminum foil/plastic wrap. It will only last 1 or 2 days before getting pretty dry.

(Yeah, I should have taken a picture of my cornbread, but this one from Hungry-Texan is pretty close to mine)

So, you could add tons of things to this. Green onions, cheddar cheese, cracked black pepper, soyrizo, corn kernels, jalapenos, etc. The world is yours! I'm going to try making this vegan so I will get back to you all on that soon. This is a incredibly tender but not wet cake that is wonderfully sweet and corn-y.

Enjoy! And I hope you are all looking forward to my Valentine's Day dinner/dessert post this week. It will be sickeningly cute, trust me. ; )

Classic Buttermilk Cornbread 5/5 Spoons

Sometimes I love sides more than I love full "real" meals.

I love to go to a restaurant and order 3 sides and gobble them up with gusto. The thing is, they have to individually be so good and different from each other that it constitutes a meal (in my mind and in my belly). I need some sort of bread product (corn bread in this instance), some sort of protein (I made organic cumin-laced black refried beans to go along with this) and a veggie (homemade guacamole! I have my own recipe, if you want it, let me know!)

(Photo courtesy of Fine Cooking)

The problem with cornbread (which I admittedly don't have a lot of experience at making) is that it can be SO DRY. I mean you can put as much butter on a dry hunk of bread as you want but you still know it's not very good. I think using buttermilk (did you know it is actually low in fat?) really moistened the bread and it is even quite tender today. I wanted to make sure to find a recipe that a. was tender (check) b. not chock full of sugar (check) and c. doesn't contain an entire stick of butter (check). I think this recipe is my new winner! Here are my notes (there are barely any!):

-- Instead of table salt, I used kosher salt and bumped it up to 1 t. because kosher salt weighs less than table salt. Interesting, huh?
-- I used low-fat sour cream without any problem.
-- Because I had it, I added about 1 c. of frozen corn kernels. I feel like this part is totally necessary.

(I'm definitely not from Alabama, but I love cornbread!)

I of course couldn't wait. So I flipped this bread out of the pan and cut it into weird chunks and gobbled it up with some butter substitute. It was the perfect amount of sweetness and had a wonderful intense corn taste that a lot of cornbreads do not have. This is a great recipe because it uses so much cornmeal and very little all-purpose flour for a super authentic taste. This *technically* is not that bad for you. There is some butter yeah, but this bread will serve a lot of people. And I'm not always so worried about butter as I appear on here, I love me some sweet cream unsalted butter. This would go great with this Vegetarian Chili or Cincinnati Chili Mac.

Coming up soon......

Red Velvet Waffles with Cream Cheese Coconut Butter

Dark Chocolate Raspberry Cupcakes with Vanilla Buttercream Frosting


and other things I'm totally making up like BBQ Beefless Tips with Mashed Potatoes and Roasted Asparagus and a White Pizza. See you soon!

Cara's Buttermilk Bread 5/5 Spoons

Did you know that toast is my favorite food? Yeah, that's right. I am an immense lover of food and to me nothing is better than two perfectly crispy, crunchy, toasty and buttery pieces of soft, dense bread. It can go wrong obviously like any meal. You could over toast your bread (although I like it pretty dark), use bad butter/butter substitute (I use Earth Balance, it is my favorite) or you could just flat out use the wrong bread. Obviously everyone's toast tastes are a very personal thing. My ideal toast is thick, chewy sourdough bread toasted until dark brown and slathered with Earth Balance.

I stayed up until 2 am last night baking/proofing/caressing Cara's Buttermilk Bread and it was worth every minute of sleep I lost. This is decidedly easy and a great way to use up extra buttermilk if you have it in the fridge. This was not hard, but you do need some time management skills. You need to make sure you have 3 hours (give or take) to make, check, form and bake your bread. It is worth it, trust me. I woke up this morning to an amazing loaf of healthy, homemade bread and TOAST. My god, the toast was splendid. I love knowing exactly what went into that loaf of bread. There are no hidden ingredients or weirdo chemicals I can't pronounce. I think I'm gonna start making a loaf of bread for myself every week instead of buying my regular challah at the grocery store.



(Pictures courtesy of One Hot Stove)

Here are my few tweaks and just general impatient bread maker notes:

-- I used half unbleached all-purpose flour and half whole wheat flour. That's pretty much what I do now for all my dough recipes.
-- I skipped a step and just kneaded it, formed it into a loaf like shape, oiled the pan and let that rise for about 2 1/2 hours. This is instead of step 5 and 6. It worked well and there was less kneading and fooling around with the dough then.
-- When I baked it, I only left it in for about 30 minutes. It says 45 and I think that would be good too, but I wanted my bread to be a bit doughy. And it was, deliciously so.
-- And this was my bad, but I didn't take the bread out of the loaf pan overnight. I set it in the microwave to cool but keep moist but when I took it out this morning, the bottom was a tad soggy. So before you let it cool, take it out of its loaf pan to let it dry out.



I give this recipe:

5/5 Spoons!

If I could give it more I would. I realize I skipped my Vegetarian Taco Tater Tot Casserole, I'll get around to it but this was far more important to me to write about. Hope this finds everyone well!