Skillet Cornbread
A savoury all-cornmeal bread baked in a preheated cast-iron pan, so the batter hits hot fat and sets a crust as it lands.
- Prep
- 15 min
- Cook
- 25 min
- Total
- 40 min
- Serves
- 8
- Revisions
- 2
Allergens
- Eggs
- Milk
Named from the ingredients as written, including those carried in from sub-recipes. This is not a guarantee — check the labels on what you actually buy, and note that a product’s recipe can change.
Ingredients
Method
Put a 25cm cast-iron frying pan into the oven and heat both to 220C/425F.
Whisk the cornmeal, bicarbonate of soda, baking powder and fine salt together in a large bowl.
Beat the eggs into the buttermilk in a jug.
Have everything measured and the pan properly hot before those two mixtures meet. The bicarbonate starts reacting with the buttermilk on contact, and a batter left standing has spent most of its lift on the worktop.
Pour the buttermilk mixture into the cornmeal.
Stir 15-20 strokes, until no dry pockets are left at the bottom of the bowl.
Stir in the 50g of melted dripping.
Check the consistency: it should pour heavily off the spoon rather than drop in lumps, and a splash more buttermilk brings it back if the cornmeal has drunk it stiff.
Take the hot pan out of the oven and set it on the hob.
Add the 25g of dripping and swirl it up the sides; it should melt on contact and shimmer.
Pour the batter straight in.
Listen as it goes. It should hiss and the edge should set on contact — batter that lands silently has gone into a pan that was not hot enough, and the crust this bread exists for is already lost.
Slide the pan back into the oven.
Bake for 20-25 minutes, until the top is set and gold-brown, the edges have pulled away from the sides and a skewer pushed into the centre comes out clean.
Cool in the pan for 10 minutes.
Turn it out onto a board, crust side up.
Cut it into wedges and eat it warm, the day it is baked.
Expect it to be dry by the next morning. There is no gluten network and no fat-rich crumb holding this together, and day-old cornbread is for crumbling into soup — the sweetcorn chowder in this collection is the obvious place for it.