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Pineapple and strawberry cornbread







The Northern version of cornbread is 50% cornmeal and 50% flour with a lot of sugar, egg, milk, butter, baking powder for a cake batter.

I don't keep cornmeal around because the black dots remind me of bugs and because flour oxidizes readily so this is regular popcorn milled in a coffee grinder. But I notice the granules do not cook all the way through when baked so this milled corn is cooked in its portion of liquid first to the consistency of regular polenta and cooled. Then additional cold liquid elements to bring down the temperature more, then the egg, and frozen sweet corn, adjusted with cold milk before adding baking powder that will activate immediately by residual heat so be ready to pour the barely mixed batter into a preheated hot pan already sizzling with butter. The batter will begin cooking immediately in the hot buttered pan without waiting to be baked. The edges will bubble and foam and set before you can get the pan back into the oven.

You know how sometime cornbread is dry. This is wet. The pineapple releases a good deal of liquid into its brown sugar and butter in a separate pot. All of that is poured over the cornbread to the last drop so that the cornbread absorbs all the liquid like a spongecake. 

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