Wait a cotton-picking minute

[mme_hardy]

Melissa Clark's New York Times recipe for skillet cornbread.  (Complete with ghastly perky video, if you can stand it)

Ingredients:

12 tablespoons (1 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter

½ cup maple syrup

2 ¼ cups buttermilk

3 large eggs

1 ½ cups yellow cornmeal, fine or medium-coarse grind

½ cup whole wheat flour

½ cup all-purpose flour

1 ½ tablespoons baking powder

1 ½ teaspoons kosher salt

½ teaspoon baking soda
 

Selected quotes:

• Some cornbread falls on the light and fluffy side of the spectrum, sweet enough to pass for dessert. Then there is crisp, lean and salty cornbread, nearly as savory as the fried chicken that often goes with it. This recipe splits the difference.
• Crisp-edged, maple-syrup-spiked and tender-crumbed, a buttered slice works equally well with a drizzle of honey or with hot sauce, or both if you just can’t decide.
• Pay attention to the scent wafting around the kitchen. When it smells like chestnuts roasting on a street corner in December, immediately pour the butter into a bowl to stop the cooking.

If you watch the video -- and I recommend being up-to-date on your insulin first -- you'll discover that Clark chooses both the cornmeal grind and the whole-wheat flour because they add sweetness.

Bless your heart, honey, if you want a cake, make a cake. 

Comments

[movingfinger]

1. God, that's twee.

2. Whole wheat flour is not sweet. It has a bitter edge to it. This is why we all got so excited about KA Flour's "white whole wheat."

2a. There is a lot of difference between fine and medium-coarse. What she means is "anything but polenta."

3. I would lay dollars to doughnuts that there's an older version of this somewhere in which corn syrup is used rather than maple syrup.

4. God, that's twee.

[mme_hardy]

Did you watch the video? It will exceed your maximum daily allowance of twee.

[adrian_turtle]

There was a moment when I thought she was using the definition of "sweet" that seems to be taught in preschools these days. When a 3-year-old starts using "sweet" to mean "tastes good," it's just annoying, and it's usually possible to get them back to using the other meaning in a few months. But I expect more from a professional adult food writer. After the thought crossed my mind the first time, I realized she does it all the time. She browns butter to make it taste a little better, she uses whole wheat flour to make it taste a little better, she uses a different grind of corn to make it taste a little better. Sure, no problem. I just wish she could find another word for "tastes better." Maybe even several different words, for the different kinds of taste?

In other news, wow is that ever a lot of butter. The butter:grain ratio is almost as high as for shortbread, though of course shortbread has no egg or buttermilk (in my experience. Who knows what the New York Times would make of it?)

[mme_hardy]

To my tongue, brown butter *is* sweeter because of the caramelization of the solids.