Skillet cornbread

As tradition built it

Serves 6 to 8. About 30 minutes.

Ingredients

• 250g stone-ground cornmeal
• 1 tsp baking powder
• ½ tsp bicarbonate of soda
• ½ tsp salt
• 2 eggs
• 350ml buttermilk
• 60g bacon fat or lard, plus extra for the pan

Method

1. Heat a cast iron skillet in the oven at 220°C with a spoonful of fat in it until smoking hot.
2. Mix the cornmeal, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda and salt, then whisk in the eggs, buttermilk and melted fat.
3. Pour the batter into the hot, greased skillet, where it should sizzle audibly on contact.
4. Bake until golden and set, roughly 20 minutes, and turn out onto a board rather than serving straight from the pan, so the crust does not steam and soften.

Notes

The exact character of Southern cornbread, white or yellow meal, sugared or not, is widely described as carrying real regional and social meaning, but some sources argue this without full sourcing, and this chapter states the claim no more strongly than that.

What a modern chef changes

The skillet's own thermal mass used deliberately, per the same logic as a Big Green Egg

Rung 6

Method

1. Preheat the skillet for longer than instinct suggests, until genuinely smoking, treating its cast iron mass with the same respect this chapter's technique ladder gives a tatakua or a ceramic grill elsewhere in this atlas, since the audible sizzle on contact is what actually builds the signature crisp bottom crust, not the oven temperature alone.