CORNBREAD & CORN MUFFINS
WHILE ALL CORNBREADS ARE QUICK TO make and bake, there are two very distinct types: northern and southern. Southerners use 100 percent white cornmeal, and they like their cornbread crumbly, dry, and flat. Most northerners prefer sweeter, lighter, and higher golden cornbreads, which they achieve by adding sugar and combining white flour and yellow cornmeal. Both types of cornbread sport a brown crust, although southern cornbread crusts are also crisp and crunchy.
After an initial round of testing, we realized that we preferred something in between, with elements of both styles incorporated into a single recipe. We liked the pure corn flavor of southern cornbread but wanted a crumb that was more moist and tender. Northern cornbread was more tender but was also fluffy, and the corn flavor was muted. We decided to start out with a southern-style recipe, since it had more of the elements that we liked.
The type of cornmeal was a natural place to begin our testing. We tested 11 different cornmeals in a simple southern cornbread recipe. Before these tests, we would have bet that color was a regional idiosyncrasy that had little to do with flavor. But tasting proved otherwise. Cornbreads made with yellow cornmeal consistently had a more potent corn flavor than those made with white meal.
How the cornmeal was ground also affected flavor. Large commercial mills use huge steel rollers to grind dent corn (a hard, dry corn) into cornmeal. This is how Quaker, the leading supermarket brand, is produced. But some smaller mills scattered across the United States grind with millstones; this product is called stone-ground cornmeal. (If water is used as an energy source, the cornmeal may be labeled "water-ground.") Stone-ground cornmeal is usually a bit coarser than cornmeal processed through steel rollers.
These smaller millers may also choose not to degerm, or remove all of the germ, cleanly from the kernel, as commercial mills do. This makes their product closer to a whole-grain cornmeal. If the color is uniform, the germ has been removed. A stone-ground cornmeal with some germ will have flecks that are both lighter and darker than the predominant color, whether that's yellow or white.
In our tests, we found the texture of cornbreads made with stone-ground meals to be more interesting, since the cornmeals were not of a uniform grind. More important, we found that cornbreads made with stone-ground cornmeal tasted much better than those made with the standard Quaker cornmeal.
The higher moisture and oil content of stone-ground cornmeal causes it to go rancid within weeks. If you buy some, wrap it tightly in plastic, or put it into a moisture-proof container, then refrigerate or freeze it. Degerminated cornmeals, such as Quaker, keep for a year if stored in a dry, cool place.
We were set on the cornmeal—yellow, preferably stone-ground. The next issue was flour. For cornbread with a rich corn flavor, we found that flour is best omitted. (For corn muffins, some flour is necessary; see Corn Muffins.)
Although we didn't want cornbread to taste like dessert, we wondered whether a little sugar might enhance the corn flavor. So we made three batches—one with no sugar, one with two teaspoons, and one with a heaping tablespoon. The higher-sugar bread was really too sweet for our tastes, but two teaspoons of sugar seemed to enhance the natural sweetness of the corn without calling attention to itself.
So far all of our testing had been done with a composite recipe under which most southern cornbread recipes seemed to fall. We had, however, run across a recipe that didn't quite fit the mold, and now seemed like the right time to give it a try.
In this simple version, boiling water is stirred into the cornmeal, then modest amounts of milk, egg, butter, salt, and baking powder are stirred into the resulting cornmeal mush and the whole thing is baked. So simple, so lean, so humble, so backwater, this recipe would have been easy to pass over. Just one bite completely changed the direction of our pursuit. Unlike anything we had tasted so far, the crumb of this cornbread was incredibly moist and fine and bursting with corn flavor, all with no flour and virtually no fat.
We were pleased, but since the foundation of this bread was cornmeal mush, the crumb was actually more mushy than moist. In addition, the baking powder, the only dry ingredient left, got stirred into the wet batter at the end. This just didn't feel right.
After a few unsuccessful attempts to make this cornbread less mushy, we started thinking that this great idea was a bust. In a last attempt to salvage it, we decided to make mush out of only half the cornmeal and to mix the remaining cornmeal with the leavener. To our relief, the bread made this way was much improved. Decreasing the mush even further—from a half to a third of the cornmeal—gave us exactly what we were looking for. We made the new, improved cornbread with buttermilk and mixed a bit of baking soda with the baking powder, and it tasted even better. Finally, our recipe was starting to feel right.
With this new recipe in hand, we performed a few more tests. We tried vegetable oil, peanut oil, shortening, butter, and bacon drippings. Butter and bacon drippings were pleasant flavor additions and improved the texture of the cornbread by making it less crumbly.
Before conducting these cornbread tests, we didn't think it was possible to bake cornbread in too hot an oven, but after tasting breads baked on the bottom rack of a 475-degree oven, we found that a dark brown crust makes bitter bread. We moved the rack up a notch, reduced the oven temperature to 450 degrees, and were thus able to cook many loaves of cornbread to golden brown perfection.
One final question: Do you need to heat up the skillet before adding the batter? If you're not a southerner, the answer is no. Although the bread will not be as crisp in an unheated pan, it will ultimately brown up with a longer baking time. If you are a southerner, of course, the answer is yes. More than the color of the meal or the presence of sugar or flour, what makes cornbread southern is the batter hitting the hot fat in a cast-iron skillet.