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.

[tigerflower]

That is definitely cake.

Southern cornbread ain't sweet *or* yellow. Northern cornbread's yellow and sweet but it ain't that sweet and sweet and fancy Jesus, it has not got that much damn BUTTER in it. Or whole wheat flour. What is she smoking? I mean clearly, the munchies got the better of her here.

[caulkhead]

Is baking powder AND baking soda a usual thing, or is that another peculiarity of this recipe? (Also, I am curious to see what her version of 'sweet' cornbread looks like.)

[vom_marlowe]

Nothing wrong with yellow cornmeal, but what the devil is all that sugar doing in there? And the butter's for the skillet, not to fatten up the dough. What in the world--how can you eat that cake with chili? Or fried chicken?

Tell her to make some nice puffy cornmeal griddle cakes to serve with bacon, if she's gonna insist on maple syrup. Maple's a breakfast food, pure and simple, and expensive besides. Better be a meal for guests.

Otherwise, you use molasses or crumbled brown sugar to sweeten, as God intended.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

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

Well, thank the Lord you added that! I was getting ready to flame someone in this comment so I'm glad you told me who. Except I already quit the Times, and New York anything.

"When it smells like chestnuts roasting on a street corner in December"

Tell them down here we don't have any chestnuts or December either.

Maple syrup! I hope it sticks to their skillet. They can pour some molasses on it at the table if they want to, but put the butter on first or it will slide off.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Toby and I both like sweet cornbread, but we bow to our Southern heritage by calling it Yankee cornbread. :) (Our go-to recipe is this one from Jon Bonnell, a local restaurateur who happily gives away all his recipes if you email him.) I did recently find out that the reason Southern cornbread doesn't have sugar in it is that the earlier varieties of corn used for it were sweeter.

I'm mostly annoyed that she's not taking the simplest step to get the skillet hot by simply throwing it into the oven while it's preheating and she's making the rest of the batter.

[madrobins]

Gah.

Me, I add a little chili and cumin to my cornbread. This sounds like a cupcake. Meh.