Turn Cornbread Into The Most Comforting Breakfast With This Delicious Twist

It can sometimes seem like as soon as you bake a perfect, golden batch, the search for ways to use up leftover cornbread begins. People usually just aren't going to help themselves to more than a square, even at the most delicious cookout, potluck, or other cornbread occasions. A lot of the most obvious applications for the remainders, like using it for stuffing or something like a creative panzanella salad, lean more toward lunch and dinnertime. But cornbread also works terrifically in breakfast preparations like French toast, too.

Breakfast itself is a little more conducive to sweets than those other meals; pancakes, waffles, muffins, and even some cereals are classics of the morning genre. And cornbread typically leans fairly confectionery itself. Its titular vegetable's natural sugars can taste pretty pronounced, after all. Those flavors, along with cornbread's yielding texture, also happen to be great with the French toast treatment. Turning an ordinary piece into French toast can even give it a bit of the extra special, crisp surface that you'd normally have needed to make your cornbread in a cast iron to achieve. But you will want to be sure to handle cornbread's deceptively dainty composition more carefully than you would any old sandwich slice for the best results.

Although there are many different ways to make cornbread, a lot of them are going to turn out pretty crumbly. That's going to make it more vulnerable to breaking, or worse, if you soak it in your French toast liquid like you would any other carb. You'll need to halve what are usually pretty thick cornbread pieces width-wise for the most effective griddling, which makes it even less structurally secure, but otherwise it won't warm through. A shallow dip in your egg, milk, sweetener, and warming spice mix on either side will be safer than full submergence in this case. If you let that batter really sink in, the cornbread is liable to fall apart before it has a chance to reach the pan.

Once it's barely moistened, you can sizzle your cornbread on each side in a buttered skillet over medium on the stovetop until its color deepens a bit and those exteriors become just a bit more rigid. You really do not want to do a lot of jostling due to the cornbread's still delicate constitution, so give it at least two minutes before your first, and hopefully only, flip. Should that initial side not be as golden as you'd like, you can even just increase the other's cook time by another 60 seconds or so to basically split the difference, rather than keep turning and turning. This French toast twist is also great with the maple syrup you might normally reach for, or a bit of honey to nod to its somewhat unexpected base.