Mini Cornbreads

Another recreation of a core-memory restaurant dish...

—What a year, huh?
—Lemon, it’s January.

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This Week’s Recipe

If you’ve been around long enough, you may know that my first job was as a bus boy at a chain restaurant in Ohio called City Barbecue. After a long night of scraping crusty mac ‘n’ cheese off the floor, I’d get to bring home basically as much food as I wanted. Usually that was a pulled pork sandwich with coleslaw, potato salad, fries, banana pudding, and cornbread. Oh, my GOD I still think about that cornbread. They were baked in little loaf tins and would rise up so high that the batter would sometimes come oozing out their tops like a volcano, giving them these little nubs — the best part.

photo: City Barbecue (cornbreads on the upper left)

photo: Alina A. on Yelp!

I have wanted to recreate these little cornbreads for a long time: they’ve been on my “To Develop” Notes App list for at least five years. And I have finally got around to it! I even went and asked USA Pan if I could try their mini loaves pan so I could perfectly recreate them — and they graciously sent me one.

Usually I have a one-track mind when it comes to recipes. I start testing the recipe, I make it as few as three or sometimes as many as 12 times, getting it right where I want it. And then I shoot photos of the recipe and a video of me making it, write it out here or on my website, and publish it. And then onto the next recipe. It is not an ideal way to do things: I’d rather test something over several weeks or months that way I don’t get sick of it and can come at it with a different perspective every time. That’s just not how my brain works. Instead, I feel intense bursts of fixation on a recipe or ingredient or flavor combination, I quell it, and then I move on.

But this cornbread recipe is one I’ve been tinkering with for a few months! It would have been nice to get it to you all in the fall, pre-Thanksgiving, but honestly, cornbread is timeless. It makes sense in all seasons: at the holidays next to turkey and potatoes, in winter on top of chili, in the summer next to barbecue ribs.

Here’s the thing: I like sweet cornbread. This cornbread contains an amount of sugar that some purists might balk at, but sugar imparts more than sweetness, it gives the tenderness, moistness, and the golden brown color that I was attempting to recreate.

Left: Indian Head Old-Fashioned Stone Ground Yellow Cornmeal; Center: Bob’s Red Mill Medium Ground Cornmeal; Right: Bob’s Red Mill Masa Harina

Let’s talk a little bit about cornmeal. There are so many brands, so many varieties, so many grind sizes on supermarket shelves. I used Indian Head Old-Fashioned Stone-Ground Yellow Cornmeal (on the left in the image above) to develop this recipe. As you can see, it’s not as fine as the masa harina on the right, but it’s not as coarse as the medium ground cornmeal in the middle.

I made this recipe in a muffin tin, mini loaves tin and jumbo tin — and I’ll give you the instructions for each of them. To achieve a taller rise, I started each batch off at a higher temperature to help with oven spring, then lowered it to finish off baking. I also only filled half the wells in the tins — which cooks the sides and bottoms of the muffins faster and sending the batter in the middle up to create that lovely dome shape.

Mini Cornbreads

Makes 12 regular muffins, 6 4-ounce mini loaves, 6 jumbo muffins

Ingredients