A friend in North Carolina sent me some heirloom cornmeal for Christmas so I made cornbread using the recipe on the package.
I was confused about the batter because it was far thicker than I expected. I called my friend in NC, we looked at a bunch of other recipes, and I decided to add a lot more buttermilk and hope for the best.
It’s tasty, and the texture is beautiful. Still don’t quite know why the batter was so thick. Next batch will be smaller, and I’m going to play more liberally with the proportion of cornmeal to buttermilk.
I love the SE Southern style cornbread if that’s what you’re going for:
Never much cared for Southern style before that recipe (and I used to have to make a Southern style cornbread at one restaurant I worked in ).
(Of course I have a Southern friend and she finds it very annoying to hear that they don’t use sugar in cornbread because she grew up eating it with some sugar)
I also like Yankee cornbread with flour and (a little) sugar, though.
I put it back in the oven and baked it more. Amazing outcome: flavor exploded. It’s darker on the bottom and top, easier to remove from the pan, and just overall so much tastier. I showed a video of it to my NC friend who sent me the cornmeal and he said, “Yeah, that’s what you want.”
Brioche cake with blackberries. I thought this cake would be dry when I saw the recipe, and having made it, I was right. There’s too much dough to very little cream cheese filling. This could use at least double the amount. Another hint is that blackberries are pretty tart, and the cream cheese filling doesn’t provide sufficient sweetness and creaminess to balance them out.
I loved making this no-knead brioche, though.
11 Likes
ChristinaM
(Hungry in Asheville, NC (still plenty to offer tourists post Hurricane))
112
Second variety for my work trip tomorrow: pan-banging ginger molasses cookies. I love these. I made them .5 oz smaller than she calls for bec otherwise they are enormous.
I have this zucchini egg ricotta rollup from YouTube transcribed and saved for next year’s large garden zucchini slices. I’d shredded all mine before seeing the recipe.
Made another two loaves of this sandwich bread with wheat bran. Since I first made this loaf it became an instant favorite. It’s to me a perfect sort of breakfast bread. It’s super soft and squishy and shreddable. I used the food processor to get the gluten developed.
Flaky cheese biscuits, from Erin Jeanne McDowell’s Savory Baking.
My second time making these, I ran about 10% short on the sour cream, and made up the difference with buttermilk. Cheese used was WSU’s Cougar Gold.
This is a yeasted dough. The recipe calls for 5 sets of folds, with a half-hour rest between each set. With the second set of folds, you spread a layer of room temperature butter. With sets three, four and five you add layers of grated cheese. I finished laminating the dough around 11:00 a.m., and kept it chilled in the fridge until 5:00 p.m.
Fun to bake and satisfying to eat, I might sometime try slipping in a few pre-cooked bacon bits and chives.
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