Oprah's Skinny Cornbread Recipe (2024)

FAQs

What is the difference between New York cornbread and southern cornbread? ›

Southern cornbread has traditionally been made with little or no sugar and smaller amounts of flour (or no flour), with northern cornbread being sweeter and more cake-like. Southern cornbread traditionally used white cornmeal and buttermilk. Other ingredients such as pork rinds are sometimes used.

I want to keep the cornbread taste, just less crumbly! I recommend extra egg yolk, adding corn, and using cast iron to bake. Also, try a little lower temperature.

Cornmeal gives cornbread its classic color and flavor, but too much can make your bread crumbly. Try replacing a little bit of cornmeal with flour. The specific measurements will depend on how much cornmeal and flour is in your recipe, but you should try to have more flour than cornmeal in your batter.

Sugar in the cornbread interferes with the flavor of the vegetables. Don't put sugar in your cornbread! Traditional cornbread isn't sweet, but many favorite recipes have sugar in them.

Southerners, on the other hand, tend to prefer white cornmeal. Many people believe that it is because, in the old South, families used white cornmeal as it more closely resembled “fancy” European wheat flour. In any case, today it remains a main component in traditional Southern buttermilk cornbread.

The yolk will make the texture more dense and smooth, a bit brownie-like, while the fact that your original batter was too thick means that the additional liquid will help the baking powder achieve better leavening, giving you an airier texture.

Let the batter sit before baking.

We found that if you leave the batter to sit at room temperature for 10 to 15 minutes before baking it, the cornmeal has some extra time to absorb flavor from the other ingredients and the leaveners (baking powder and baking soda) get a head start.

While oil can make cakes and quick breads luxuriously tender, I find the cornbread lacks flavor if butter isn't present. Because butter doesn't make the bread as moist as oil does, I pair it with buttermilk. Buttermilk: Buttermilk makes cakes, muffins, and breads extra moist.

Why Is Jiffy Mix So Crumbly? The recipe on the box doesn't give the batter as much moisture as I like in my cornbread, which is why it can sometimes turn out crumbly. Adding in the sour cream and vegetable oil makes a huge difference and makes the best moist cornbread.

Soaking the cornmeal in buttermilk for a few hours, or even overnight, tenderizes the large grains of cornmeal, making the bread more moist and tender. This step is optional, however, and the bread is still delicious without the soaking step.

What is the best cornmeal for cornbread? ›

As for the best cornmeal for cornbread, either fine- or medium-grind cornmeal is a great choice. Medium-grind cornmeal will bring slightly more texture and grittiness to the batter, which you may or may not want (it's up to you!). You can use fine or medium cornmeal in these extra corny muffins.

Why is my cornbread dense? If you overmixed your batter or over-measured your flour, your buttermilk cornbread could turn out dense. Be gentle with your batter and make sure you know how to properly measure flour.

It didn't stop me from successfully baking a lot of great cornbread, because the consistency of the batter is the best indication of whether the proportions are correct. The batter should be rather loose.

generally speaking, cornbread is crumbly if there is too high a proportion of cornmeal to flour. you need the gluten in the flour to hold it together and also enough moisture. if it is too high in fat it will also be too tender and crumbly.

A hoecake is cornbread made minimalist—a thin, unleavened round made from the simplest batter (cornmeal, water, and salt), crisp at the edges, glistening on both sides from the fat it was fried in, golden in patches.

The texture was coarse and crumbly, while the taste was plain and bland. Up until that point in my life, I had only consumed sweetened Yankee cornbread and was completely unaware of the savory Southern variety.

In 1892, a Times correspondent, after enumerating the many types of corn-based breads eaten in Virginia, noted, "It will be observed that in none of them is sugar used. There are cornmeal puddings served with sweet sauces, but no Southern cook would risk the spoiling of her cornbreads by sweetening them."

Real, traditional, Southern-style cornbread is savory, not sweet, and always has been.