What’d You Do Last Weekend?
Best brunch item ever? Maybe, but why don't you try them yourself and decide?
Chile Cheese Skillet Cornbread
If you grow up in Texas, cornbread's in your genes. Whether in a skillet, moistened as dressing at Thanksgiving, or eaten cold with sugar and milk for breakfast, it shows up everywhere, all the time. And when you eat it that much, somehow you learn to make it work. I had to do just that when I had a hankering for jalapeno cheese cornbread (to go with our smoked ribs) and found I was out of a whole host of pantry goods, including cornmeal.
Normally I would check with Ruhlman's Ratio for advice, but in this case I went with my gut: masa for most of the cornmeal, yogurt and milk for the buttermilk, Bakewell Cream for the baking powder, random cheese to give it a little pop, and Hatch green chiles for the jalapenos. Our good friends gave us bags of them roasted last year during green chile season in New Mexico, so I peeled, seeded and chopped them in. The results were 
remarkable - the masa gave the cornbread a more pronounced corniness, and the green chiles added real heat that the jalapenos would have lost!
This Frankenbread will be back on our table again, served alongside beans or ribs, just like last weekend.
Green Chile Skillet Cornbread
1+1/4 c masa
3/4 c cornmeal (or whatever amount combines to 2 c)
1/2 c AP flour
1 tsp Bakewell Cream
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp Kosher salt
1 egg
1 c yogurt
1+ c milk
2 T vegetable oil
2 Hatch green chiles, roasted, peeled, seeded, and chopped
1/2 c sharp cheese (more if you like your bread cheesy)
- Preheat the oven to 450F.
- Sift together the dry ingredients.
- Combine the wet ingredients in a separate bowl. You may need to add more milk to make the cornbread dough a little more moist (masa seems to soak up more liquid than standard cornmeal).
- Combine the wet and dry ingredients together and mix well, but do not over-mix.
- A few minutes before you put the cornbread dough into the skillet, melt half a stick of butter in the bottom and move it around to grease all sides. It should be at browned butter stage when you add the dough and the skillet will be very hot.
- Add the dough to the skillet and smooth out quickly.
- Bake for 20 minutes or until the cornbread begins to pull away from the sides of the pan.
I like to melt a few more tablespoons of butter on the top just before it comes out of the oven - it sort of gives the cornbread a buttery crust all around.
Jalapeno Cornbread
