- Today I am making cornbread. Now, I grew up in Upstate New
York in Rochester, New York and so I didn't have
Southern cornbread that's made in the cast iron, you start with the
corn meal mush, there's no flour,
there's no sugar. That's a very distinctive
type of Southern cornbread. That's not what I grew up with. I grew up with sweet and cakey and so that's what
I'm gonna make today. Now, it starts with a
little bit of buttermilk. That's just 1 cup of buttermilk. And I love the method
for this cornbread 'cause it's so simple. You whisk the wet together,
you whisk the dry together, and you combine them,
throw it in the oven. So this is the wet ingredients. Into the buttermilk
goes two eggs. All right, now the honey. Now, the honey is the sweetener
in this sweet cornbread and we're gonna use a
whopping 2/3 cup of honey. And, believe it or not,
it's sweet cornbread, but it's not achingly sweet because honey just
isn't as sweet as sugar. So to measure the honey, I'm using this fantastic
adjustable measuring cup which just makes
measuring sticky things like honey really easy. All right, so that's 2/3 cup. Now this is why I
love this thing. Into the bowl it goes. No mess, no fuss. I know, it's the
little things, right? Last but not least, some butter. And here I have four
tablespoons of unsalted butter that's been melted and cooled. My little butter melting pot. Add that to all the
wet ingredients. Now just whisk it together. Now, you really
wanna whisk this well 'cause you wanna
dissolve all that honey and it'll stick to the
bottom of the bowl. So take your time here. Really make sure that honey
is dissolved into the liquid. And you notice I'm using
an oversized mixing bowl. That's by design because I
usually make a good mess. But when you're whisking
something like this, it's nice to have a
little extra room. Oh, that honey smells good! All right, so set the
wet ingredients aside. Now time to work on
the dry ingredients. And, as always, when baking,
I like to weigh everything. It's just faster and easier. And as I mentioned this is a
Northern-style sweet cornbread, which means it's a combination
of flour and corn meal. So it's about half and half. A little bit extra flour
compared to corn meal. It's 1 1/4 cups of flour
to 1 cup of corn meal, but in weights, that 6
1/4 ounces, nailed it, and 5 ounces of corn meal. Now, you can really use any
brand of corn meal you like. I like the more
coarsely-ground corn meal because I like those
gritty, chewy bits in the finished bread, but if you use a finer grind,
it still works just as well. There we go, 5 ounces. Now for some leavener 'cause this is
essentially a quick bread, so we're gonna use a combination of baking powder
and baking soda. So starting with
the baking powder, a teaspoon of baking powder,
a teaspoon of table salt, last but not least, 1/4
teaspoon of baking soda, and that's it, so easy. So you want to whisk the
dry ingredients together and that's pretty good. Now wet into dry. Get all of that out of there. Now you just stir 'em together
till there are no lumps. A few lumps are okay. I'm never worried about
over stirring this 'cause, again, it's
a combination of
flour and corn meal, so you're never gonna
build up too much gluten. You can see right
away, that buttermilk and those leaveners are
starting to create bubbles. That's a good sign. That looks pretty good. Now I'm gonna bake
this in a metal 8" pan that I've greased already
with vegetable oil spray. And I like using
metal pans here, one, because I like
the straight sides, whereas most glass
pans have curved sides, but also the metal
pan makes the outside really nice and crisp and
I like those crisp edges. If you do use a
glass pan however, the baking time will
be significantly longer by five or ten minutes. There we go. Now, this takes about
half an hour in the oven, 375 degrees on the middle rack. That cornbread has been in
the oven for 30 minutes. Time to take a look. Oh! Smells good, doesn't
it, Ziggy? (chuckles) Now, to test cornbread
for doneness, there's a couple ways to do it. First, I like to use a skewer
and poke it in the center. Spin it a little bit. See if there's any raw batter. So no raw batter, that's a good sign that
it's baked through. Also the browning
is a good indicator that it's evenly baked. You can see it is a
nice golden brown. Now, the last test is
when you take your fingers and you press on the outside, 'cause it bakes
from the outside in and you can see how
it's baked there and you can see
how bouncy it is. And then slowly move
your finger to the center and you look for that resistance that you feel on the
outside in the center. So as baked as it
is on the outside, it's baked in the center,
and this feels perfect. All right, so the cornbread's
a little on the delicate side. We're not gonna take
it outta the pan yet. Gonna give it five
or ten minutes to cool down and set up in
the pan before we turn it out. So I'll set this aside. And this has cooled in its pan,
whew, for five, ten minutes. Now I'm just gonna
turn it out of its pan and let it cool completely. Oh ho, and you can see
that dark golden crust on the outside. That is my favorite part! I'm a corner cornbread
kind of person because I love that dark flavor. It's almost like a
caramelized honey flavor. Time to start getting
everything assembled. I like to cut this into
relatively smallish pieces. You can always go
back for seconds if you want a big ol' piece. Some are bigger than
others, aren't they? It's rustic. I'm gonna put the
cornbread on nice platter. Mm.
(dog barks) Mm! Somebody hears cornbread. All right, might as well make
a little plate to taste it. All right, corner piece
of cornbread for me. A little bit of
cornbread, mm hmm! Oh that cornbread has
that fragranced finish thanks to the honey. See you next time. Thanks for watching. What'd you think? Leave a comment below and let me know what you're
excited to cook this week. And while you're at it,
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