Patch’s Weekend Project: Our DIY Dude Puts Your Cast-Iron Cornbread Recipes to the Test!

By JASON CARPENTER

After last week’s post, I got quite a bit of feedback on how to season a cast iron pan. In my article, I used olive oil, but there are a lot of old school cooks like Steven and Petey who prefer to use bacon fat. I’m going to give it a try. I want to hear more ideas from you about what makes a perfectly seasoned pan—and how to care for the pan once you’ve seasoned it.

You also came up with some innovative ways to restore cast iron cookware. In fact, Paul Silansky wrote his own article about cast iron restoration, which included some impressive techniques using an electric wire brush and steel wool. Please, keep these ideas coming! You never know where my column might lead, and you never know when you might find your name in it.

This week’s column was inspired by your comments.

Cast Iron Cornbread

Last week, I shared with you my experience restoring some old crusty cast iron cookware, using a recipe from the internet. Well, Patch readers came in with all kinds of helpful advice, including one reader’s favorite recipe: cast-iron cornbread. Since I’m always up for a tasty loaf, I gave it a try.

I texted Morgan the ingredients list so he could pick them up on the way over:

• 1 cup corn meal
• 1/2 cup flour
• 1 tsp. salt
• 1 tsp. baking powder
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1 cup buttermilk
• 1 tbsp. oil
• 1 egg 

According to Jane Bellomy, all I needed to do was:

“Whisk all together thoroughly and pour into skillet which has couple tbsp. oil distributed on bottom of pan; bake 20 min. @ 400 degrees.”

So, that’s exactly what I did. In a glass bowl, I mixed the dry ingredients together, then put in the wet ingredients. Only problem was, I don’t know the difference between using liquid buttermilk and the powdered stuff! After all, we’re going to bake this, right?

I did a quick internet search and realized I’d probably be skewered for substituting real buttermilk for the powdered stuff. But I had a deadline...no time for another trip to town!

So, on I went, mixing everything together. I preheated the oven at 400F and added a tbsp. of olive oil to the bottom of the pan.

I poured the mixture into the pan, popped it into the oven and envisioned a nice wedge of piping hot cornbread.

What I did NOT realize, however, was that I should have pre-heated the skillet too. See, Southerners really perfected the art of cast iron cornbread. In the South they prefer to preheat the pan with bacon grease, so the piping hot grease gives the bread a beautifully crispy crust all the way around. Oh, and they shun the sugar and sweeteners us Yankees like to put in our cornbread up North. Cornbread was originally a Native American food that became very popular during the Civil War because it was cheap, easy to make, and corn was abundant.

With 20 minutes to kill, Morgan and I swapped cornbread stories. Truth is, the best cornbread I ever ate was probably a terrible store-bought, day old loaf. But at the time, it didn’t matter.

See, in 2011, I underwent what doctors call a clinical trial Depleted T-Cell Alogenaic Stem Cell Transplant. In English, this means, I had a bone marrow transplant that controlled how many T-cells I received from my donor in an effort to treat my multiple myeloma (aka bone marrow cancer).

Believe it or not, I was required to be in isolation in my apartment for ONE YEAR—no baseball games, no crowds, no restaurants, no raw food, no uncooked veggies, no salads. I could only be around 3 people at a time because my immune system was so fragile that the tiniest of colds could kill me.

For months, I couldn’t hold anything down and I lost nearly 60 lbs. It was not fun. But I remember one day my mother coming into my apartment with an armful of my favorite breakfast items: Grits, bacon, eggs and cornbread.

And let me tell you, using that cornbread to scoop up some buttery grits and egg was heaven. For a minute, I felt normal. And my mother, who took care of me for 8 months of recovery, didn’t feel so helpless for once. Thanks, in part, to cornbread.

BIZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ!!

The timer hit 20 minutes and it was time to go from fantasizing about cornbread to eating some. I forgot to mention that I added a little Massachusetts flair to my cornbread—I popped in a ¼ cup of cranberries to the mix. I figured it would add a nice sweet/tart taste to the loaf.

Success!! I busted out the pizza cutter and sliced off a wedge of the cornbread. Delicious! Even my cranberry addition worked well and so Morgan and I enjoyed my first ever cast iron cornbread creation.

Thank you, Patch readers!