Cast Iron Skillet Cornbread

Ingredients

• Cornmeal – You can buy fine, medium, and coarsely ground corn meal. A fine grind yellow corn meal creates the softest, cake-like texture and classic yellow color. Feel free to sub in a medium grind or even white corn meal in this recipe.
• Flour – Wheat flour provides a bit of structure to keep your corn bread from falling apart.
• Leavening – Baking powder and baking soda keep the cornbread from being dense.
• Buttermilk – Buttermilk adds tang to balance out the sweetness in the honey cornbread. Sub in milk or make homemade buttermilk with milk and a tablespoon of vinegar.
• Brown butter – Brown butter adds a nutty flavor to the cornbread. Even better, browning it in the cast iron skillet saves you from cleaning yet another thing!
• Corn kernels – Use frozen or fresh corn. For suggestions how to cut corn kernels from the cob, check out my sweet corn soup recipe.

Cast iron cooking

If you have just one frying pan in your kitchen, it should be an inexpensive cast iron skillet. Because cast iron skillets can move from stove top to oven, they’re great for making this brown butter cornbread, a one-pan bourbon pork tenderloin, cast iron chicken breasts, shakshuka, or a bacon frittata. You can even cook with cast iron on a camp fire or use it to make s’mores indoors!

You can even buy your cast iron “pre-seasoned” these days. Or season your skillet yourself with Crisco or oil and put it in a hot oven for 2 to 3 hours.

Cleaning is where gentleness is needed. Don’t use steel wool or hard scrubbing. And make sure to dry it completely. But even if you aren’t gentle, you can always bring your cast iron skillet back to life by re-seasoning it!

Variations and substitutions

• Sub out the corn and green onions for bacon and chopped jalapeno.
• Make your brown butter cornbread in a square baking pan, or make cornbread muffins in a muffin tin.
• Use your day old skillet cornbread to make cornbread stuffing!

The inspiration

This cornbread post was first shared in February 2021 when I was cooking from Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking by Toni Tipton-Martin. Tipton-Martin’s cookbook lists a “flight” of five cornbread recipes: hot water cornbread, cornmeal griddle cakes, extra-light buttermilk cornbread (“light” meaning only 6 tablespoons of butter), Spanish cornbread, and spoon bread.

But that’s just the start of cornbread possibilities. The cornbread chapter in Bernard Clayton’s New Complete Book of Breads is 24 pages long and includes 18 different recipes! I make several different types of cornbread, but this cast iron cornbread recipe I’m now sharing here is the version I make most frequently.

Step 1: Heat the oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit.

Step 2: Brown the butter in the cast iron skillet. To brown butter, melt the butter slowly until the popping stops and the butter solids have just started to brown. Remove the pan from the heat, and let it cool slightly as you make the cornbread batter.

Note that if you are familiar with browning butter, this recipe stops the process sooner than you would because it’s challenging to see how brown the butter is getting in a cast iron pan. The butter will continue to cook in the retained heat of the cast iron.

Step 3: Whisk all of the dry ingredients (fine yellow cornmeal, all-purpose flour, baking powder, salt, and baking soda) together in a large bowl.

Step 4: Measure out the buttermilk in a 2 or 4 cup glass measuring cup. Then add the egg and honey and beat lightly.

Step 5: Add the liquid ingredients from the measuring cup and the brown butter to the dry ingredients, scraping out the butter with a silicone spatula. Stir only until you can no longer see any pockets of flour.

It will be lumpy. That’s ok.

Step 6: Add in the corn kernels and chopped green onions and stir gently to mix. Do not over mix.

Step 7: Add the cornbread batter to the cast iron skillet, being careful if the skillet is quite warm. Smooth out the top as much as you can with your spatula.

What to serve with cornbread

Serve your cast iron skillet cornbread with your favorite chili, or try one of these other combinations:

• BBQ! Make pulled pork or Dutch oven pulled chicken, or BBQ chicken meatballs. Don’t forget the apple pie baked beans and purple cabbage slaw!
• With fried chicken or these baked coconut panko chicken tenders.
• As a side to soups like this roasted broccoli and almond, garbanzo bean soup, or 4-ingredient potato soup.
• With a main course salad like a rainbow salad bowl or taco salad.

Recipe FAQs

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