If given the choice, I will choose biscuits over cornbread but every once in a while I get a craving for it. Since we have the cast-iron skillet, it seemed only fitting to make a nice batch of cornbread just like my grandmother would have made. Growing up we would actually put a piece of cornbread in a glass of milk and eat it with a spoon. That probably sounds weird but I remember it tasting really good!

This recipe really isn’t difficult, though I should mention that this particular recipe is one my husband made. I was just there for moral support and of course taste-testing. We used a medium-ground cornmeal but as the recipe notes don’t use a coarse-ground cornmeal.

You’ll start off this recipe by toasting the cornmeal for a few minutes in a very hot oven. Then add the toasted cornmeal to the sour cream and milk mixture. According to America’s Test Kitchen, this is what gives the cornbread the perfect texture inside. Then you heat some oil in the skillet, mix together the remaining ingredients, and bake. Ta-da – the perfect southern cornbread.

The cornbread is baked at a higher temperature to help give it a nice crunchy crust but I should probably let you know that something weird happened while baking. At one point I was upstairs and saw smoke coming up from the bathroom window. Not realizing what it was I walked downstairs and immediately smelled smoke. My husband opened the stove door and smoke came POURING out. I honestly have never seen so much smoke and every smoke detector in our house was going off. We actually had to go outside it had permeated the entire house and there was such a thick layer of smoke we couldn’t breath and it was still a little smokey that evening. We have no idea what happened because the cornbread itself wasn’t burned at all. It could totally be a weird fluke on our end but something to keep in mind if you try this recipe just in case! We will for sure try this again so I’ll update this post when I do so you know if it happened again.

Thankfully the smoke incident didn’t affect the taste and it was so good with our meal. Again, I prefer biscuits over cornbread, but this recipe had a great flavor and looked so good in the cast iron skillet! Hands down we’ll make this again, especially since fall is right around the corner and this would taste great with a nice soup!

Baking Ease	9
Time Spent	9
Taste	10
Visual	10

Recipe Used: America’s Test Kitchen