Making cornbread for the first time. My recipe says fine ground corn meal but my store has only either stone ground whole grain corn flour (very fine) or coarse ground gluten free corn meal. Does it matter which one I use?
Thanks.
I make cornbread often, but it's always the southern version, without any wheat flour or sugar. Unless your recipe specifically calls for corn flour, as opposed to cornmeal, I don't think you'd get the intended results with corn flour.
I love my coarse/stone ground cornmeal (which is gluten free, being corn with not wheat), but I often grind it in my spice grinder (coffee grinder but used only for spices and cleaned after each use) to get a finer grain for many applications.
You still use the coarse corn meal as is, but it will have a grittier texture and you might need to add a bit more liquid. I actually prefer the gritty texture, but you may not, especially if it's your first try and if you are used to northern style cornbreads.
I would buy the coarse ground and then blitz in a food processor to make it more fine (or coffee grinder if it's a smaller amount)
Haven't tried this one myself but anson mills (known for their grits) as this recipe for skillet cornbread using the coarse cornmeal- the photo gives you a good idea of the texture
http://www.ansonmills.com/recipes/464
I love that Anson Mills recipe and it looks a lot like the southern style cornbread I make using very similar recipes (except I use buttermilk). It is a very different texture than what people who've mainly had northern cornbread, which includes white wheat flour and sugar along with the cornmeal, might expect.
If someone is expecting the soft, cake like texture and sweetness like I just had in Boston two days ago, this recipe and other southern style recipes like it might be quite a shock.
Here is a northern style recipe that specifies stone ground yellow cornmeal.
http://www.abreadaday.com/northern-st....
I've seen up to half a cup of sugar in other northern style recipes; this one uses only 3 tbs of sugar.
I think they mean not coarse cornmeal, which I use for things like under pizza dough. I use medium grind for cornbread. I don't use corn flour, which is as you said is very fine, for cornbread.
The stone ground should be fine. Its usually pretty finely ground, but uneven. And tends to be whole grain corn meal, so its got a better flavor. Particularly if its Indian Head you should be able to just swap it out for the fine ground.
For a beginner a northern style cornbread using roughly equal parts flour and cornmeal is the easiest - both in cooking and in eating. The southern style, using all cornmeal, might be too coarse and/or crumbly.
While southern purists insist there shouldn't be an sugar in their bread, the amount of sugar in the northern style is highly variable. Northern recipes work perfectly fine without sugar. Some even argue that traditional field ripened corn was sweeter than the modern - though I have some doubts about that claim.
Cornmeal texture can vary. My ideal, for a northern style, is coarse enough to taste, but not so coarse that I'm left with uncooked grit sticking in my teeth. It is probably safer to err on the side of fineness. Stone ground will be more variable in texture than roll-mill ground (polenta style cornmeal).
I once made southern style with a fine cornmeal (Bobs Red Mill corn flour) and thought that it worked well. The fine cornmeal plus the crust formed by starting in a hot skillet gave it a structure that a coarser meal would have lost.
In the UK, 'cornflour' is what Americans call cornstarch. But the corn flour that Bobs Red Mill sells is ok for cornbread.
One trick when using a coarser ground meal is to pour boiling water over it (about 1/2c per c of corn) and let it sit for 10 minutes (covered). This starts the hydration process.
The best corn is sweeter than commodity grade, but just by a little bit.
And nobody except people who want to show how filthy rich they are (read drug lords) has the best corn.
I don't insist that southern style has no white flour... just that it's not sweet (If i do add a dash of sugar, the salt I add balances the flavor nicely).
I have 2 main memories of cornbread from my childhood
- a buffet in Iowa that served their cornbread with a little pitcher of syrup
- a casserole that my mom made that had a cornbread topping. That used the usual flour/cornmeal mix, but certainly wasn't sweet. Almost a shepherds pie with cornbread instead of mashed potatoes.
And my mom was from the South - though maybe too far south, the Rio Grande valley (of Swedish parentage). :)
Where are you located? What store did you look in? Any of the run-of-the-mill cornmeals available in the baking section of a typical supermarket (and for that matter, many "specialty" stores and certainly places like Whole Foods and Trader Joe's) is what they mean. If you're in NYC as your "locations" suggest, "Indian Head" seems to be the mainstream brand most commonly available in these parts, and it's available everywhere.. Basically, pretty much anything you'll find on shelves in NYC labelled "cornmeal" as opposed to "corn flour", "polenta", or "corn meal for polenta" should work just fine... Hell, you can probably find it in the grocery section of a large chain drugstore like Duane Reade, Rite Aid, CVS, or Walgreen's...
PS: Unless you're willing to end up with a product with an uneven crumb, I would NOT try to "grind" coarse corn meal in sufficient quantities for corn bread in anything but an actual grain grinder (ie, not in a blender, food processor, etc) because you simply won't get an even result that way, unless you go to absurd lengths to sift the results over and over (and over) again...
Thanks everybody. All helpful and interesting. I am on Upper West Side and (before getting your answers) I bought the Bob's Red corn flour at Barzini's. Actually, I have barely eaten corn bread before never mind making. I was inspired by making chile con carne and reading that in the south cornbread is sometimes served with it. My results were delicious and it is so easy to make. I am now thinking of adding parmesan, prosciutto and God knows what. Should I be arrested?
which flour and recipe did you use?
Adding cheese, meats, chorizo, corn kernels, poblano peppers, jalapeños, cottage cheese or sour cream to make it a bit lighter, chopped scallions, even chopped olives or sundried tomatoes, etc. are common and delicious.
Part of why cornbread is such an American, and especially Southern, bread is that corn grew better than wheat in the colonies. And later the midwestern wheat went mainly to the NE cities. Corn remained a staple with Southern subsistence farmers and sharecroppers for a long time.
Italy adopted corn, but mainly in the mush, polenta, form. There are some baked recipes that call for polenta, in part to give a crunch. Mostly though they are cakes and cookies, not baking-powder breads.
I have seen recipes from Greece and the Balkans for cornbread. That is especially associated with deprivation during war years. Some of those recipes flavor the bread with orange juice or zest.
Portugal is known for a yeast bread that uses cornmeal.
And curiously one of the better cornbread recipes that I've followed is from a Korean blogger, http://www.maangchi.com/recipe/oksusu...
Cornbread comes from Indian days...
Yes, some sort of corn cake comes from the Indians - maybe a simple slurry or dough cooked on a wood slab set before the fire, or fried on a hot stone (Johnnycake). But the modern cornbread follows the invention of baking soda and baking powder in the mid 19th c.
Spoon bread, which is more of a corn and egg souffle was earlier. I participated in a thread that traced the name 'spider cake' to the long legged iron skillet used to bake a form of spoon bread in an open hearth.
New England has Indian pudding - a cornmeal mush flavored with molasses and ginger, and steamed brown bread (made with rye, wheat, corn and molasses). Anadama is a lighter, sweeter version with yeast.
Baking soda's native to the southwest. And if not that, they were using woodash, which is unrefined, but does leaven.
But from I've read, the pre-industrial versions of baking soda and pearlash where unreliable and apt to contribute a bad taste.
http://www.fourpoundsflour.com/the-hi...
" Pearlash was only in use for a short time period, about 1780-1840. After that, Saleratus, which is chemically similar to baking soda, was introduced and more frequently used."
I've also seen recipes using an ammonia leavener, mainly in Scandinavian cookbooks.
I wonder if there's any documentary evidence of how baked goods like cornbread changed in the mid 1800s with the introduction of reliable chemical leaveners. Early biscuits were things like beaten biscuits and hardtack, not the light-as-a-feather ones that White Lily fans rave about.
Another variable was the oven. Baking in an open hearth was quite different from baking in an castiron stove (and the modern gas/electric oven).
And for the ever reliable foodtimeline reference
http://www.foodtimeline.org/foodfaq.h...
"For those who actully cooked the stuff, cornmeal was hard going. Not only was corn obdurately hard to pound even to coarse meal, but the meal refused to respond to yeast. No matter how they cooked it, in iron or on bark or stone, corn paste lay flat as mud pies...Heaviness was a constant colonial complaint, which cooks sought to remedy by mixing cornmeal with the more finely ground flours of rye or wheat-when they could get them.."
http://www.foodtimeline.org/foodfaq.h... - baking soda
""Durkee's Baking Powder. Housewives are advised to try the above article and they will find a cessation of complaints from husbands and other about sour or heavy bread, biscuits, pastry, &c, and on the contrary, will hear accompanied by smiles "What nice biscuits you have made, my dear," &c &c. Grocers and other can be supplied by calling at or sending orders through Penny Post to the principal depot, No. 139 Water St."
---New York Times, April 7, 1852 (p.2)"
the preindustrial versions were more "burn this type of wood" (which contributes one imagines a smoky taste).
From today's Soda Bread article on Serious Eats
So-called "aerated" breads emerged in the 1820s, as commercial bakers in London discovered that the volatile reaction between baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) and hydrochloric acid could free their schedules from the plodding tyranny of yeast. The idea was to create a loaf to rival the finest yeasted bread, which led to a slew of patents filed by bakers hoping to corner the market.
Mercifully, folks at home paired baking soda with a far tastier and less alarming alternative: buttermilk. That same combo gave rise to cornbread in America, but, with "patent bread" as their model, British bakers favored plain white flour (even then vastly more popular than whole-wheat). Soda bread's association with Ireland arose after the devastation of the country's potato crop in the 1840s, which forced a people historically ambivalent toward bread to start baking en masse.
Judging by what they say on the Bob's Red Mill website, it looks like their "corn flour" is finer than what you'd normally use for cornbread, though they do offer the suggestion of using part cornmeal, part corn flour as an alternative when making cornbread, so it seems like it shouldn't go to waste...
I imagine you'd overpay for it there, but fwiw, I'd be very (, very) surprised if Barzini's doesn't also carry Indian Head cornmeal...
As for being arrested, well, yeah, I imagine many Southerners and expat Southerners would think so, but given the bizarre things many Americans seem to do with "regional foods" that hail from someone else's region, I don't think you have much to worry about here.;)
If questioned, say it is an old Mexican recipe -
That is, the cornbread variant I've made in recent years is derived from "Pastel de Elote"; the recipe I'll talk about includes corn kernels, cheese and green chilies. I have made it in multiples, to feed a crowd; frozen it ahead and reheated (retains taste, texture & moisture quite well); substituted European ingredients, including Turkish corn meal.... People like it a lot.
My recipe came from the Sunset Mexican Cookbook from 1969 (there was a later version with fewer eggs - I tried it once, but thought it was a mistake).
If you use Pinterest you can see the recipe at
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/2077989...
That's for 10 servings; one can cut it down or freeze some. I cut sugar to 1/2 cup and use plain corn kernels (canned are OK) instead of cream-style corn; you can add some hotter chilies, or bits or green or red pepper, for color. Relatively coarse corn meal works.
to me, that's like spicing up rice. good if you're eating alone, but cornbread's a side, and meant to be kinda plain.
... everyone else disagrees with me.
hmm thought I knew a bit about cornbread, clearly a new playground to explore.
Get an old fashioned box of Quaker yellow corn meal and you'll be fine.
I have been looking for a mexican or green chile cornbread from the back of the (discontinued) pioneer box forever. I know I made it in the early 1990's. If you have it or even remember the name please post.
Looks like this is their original cornbread recipe but minus the 3TB self rising flour that this author added. Perhaps you can use this and add your green chilies...
http://www.lavenderandlovage.com/2014...
Although apparently there is a Pioneer brand cornmeal mix in a box if that's what you are referring to instead.
There's probably nothing special about the recipe except that it includes one or more (small) cans of diced green chiles, and maybe some grated/diced cheese.
Various companies make cornbread mixes. Jiffy is the best known, but Martha White and White Lily also make them. Pioneer actually owned White Lily before they sold it to Smuckers. I don't think there's much difference in the various brands of mixes. Jiffy might be sweeter than the 'southern' brands.
If a recipe calls for a cornbread mix, I'd use equal parts flour and cornmeal, and 1 tsp of baking powder per cup of flour(s). And about 1/2 tsp of salt per cup (unless salt is otherwise called for in the recipe).
Thanks so much Ttrockwood and paulj, I have tried various other recipes and just can't seem to get the same flavor and consistency. I have even called the company and they say they don't have the recipe because the company changed ownership. Just hoping someone out there copied it down.
What was distinctive? The cornbread itself (texture, grit, rise, cornflavor), or the green chile aspect?
I was about to type out a way-pre-1990s recipe from my mother, which may well have come from a corn meal package. However, now I see that while it has little less baking powder and a little more sugar, it is rather similar to the one in the link Madrid supplied earlier (copied below) with two exceptions: no milk, and instead of butter, 1/4c bacon drippings. Mum's notes suggest that she used two eggs, while the original (package?) recipe had only one; in that case increase buttermilk to 1c.
Madrid's link: http://www.abreadaday.com/northern-st...
Also, the Serious Eats pieces on Soda Bread really might help to track down the problem, since they go into detail on e.g. the role and use of buttermilk and the effect of different amounts of stirring.
The one Paul mentioned: http://www.seriouseats.com/2016/03/ho...
On the way to that one I ran across http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/20... - fewer details, but sums up the importance of buttermilk and may add a couple of points.
As others have said, I don't think adding green chiles would be a problem. Good luck!
In my experience cornbread recipes aren't that sensitive to ingredient changes. I aim for 1 tsp of baking powder (or baking soda equivalent) per cup of flour. Otherwise, as long as the batter has about the right final consistency, it turns out fine. One time, while camping I didn't have eggs; the result was more crumbly. Cornmeal coarseness affects texture; as does the cornmeal to flour ratio. Straight milk and baking powder works fine, though I tend to stock buttermilk these days. I probably wouldn't notice much difference if I used water (or one of the pseudo milks). I've used ground flax as egg substitute.
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