Is a good cornbread recipe savory or sweet? It’s a topic most cooks have strong feelings about. I may have grown up in the north (sweet cornbread territory), but I learned how to bake in a professional kitchen in Alabama, where adding a smidgeon of sugar to cornbread is considered blasphemy. I’ve heard both sides of the debate and tasted prime examples of bothsweet andsavory cornbread.My opinion? It doesn’t matter as long as that cornbread has a crispy, golden crust. And to do that, all you need is a preheated skillet.
The technique of preheating your skillet (ideally, cast iron) before pouring in the cornbread batter appeared in 1976 in Edna Lewis’s pioneering cookbook,The Taste of Country Cooking.Her recipe—which uses both butter and lard—calls for preheating the pan and adding the hot fat directly into the cornbread batter.“Cornmeal batter must be poured into a sizzling hot pan, otherwise it will stick,”Lewis writes.
Since then, the preheating technique has shown up in recipes from Southern culinary authorities likeCheryl Day and Frank Stitt among others. Day greases the skillet with a pat of butter and lets it brown before pouring the batter in; Stitt heats the skillet with a splash of bacon grease, then pours all but a tablespoon of the hot fat into the cornbread batter. It follows the same logic as preheating apizza stone before sliding the ’za on: When the cornbread batter makes contact with the hot pan, it jump-starts the cooking process, creating an exponentially crisper, more golden crust.
The best cornbread is all about those crispy edges.
I learned this trick long ago, but I was reminded of its brilliance while flipping through Jocelyn Delk Adams’s recently released cookbook,Everyday Grand. Her recipe for brown butter cornbread, with its crackly top and deeply burnished edges, defies cornbread conventions in more ways than one. Unlike Day or Stitt, who use either butteror bacon grease, Delk Adams harkens back to Lewis’s double-fat tradition, asking: Why not both? But if the nutty, salted brown butter and fatty bacon drippings lead you to believe this is a savory cornbread, don’t be fooled: With a substantial amount of sugar (¼ cup of granulated sugar, plus ⅓ cup honey) and a teaspoon of vanilla extract, this cornbread resists categorization on either side of the savory-sweet matrix. Still, Delk Adams’s recipe stays true to tradition in one meaningful way: It starts with a preheated skillet.
To achieve the crispiest golden crust on your cornbread, Delk Adams instructs you to grease the skillet liberally with bacon grease (if you don’t have that, shortening, butter, or oil will do), then pop it into the hot oven for 5 minutes before pouring the batter in. “As soon as you pour your cornbread batter into a hot, greased pan, it immediately starts the process of creating the crispy outer layer, even before the cornbread is baked,” Delk Adams says. “As the baking proceeds, the crust continues to build, sealing in the signature crispness while also producing a moist interior.” The sugar in the batter helps the crust caramelize even more.
Delk Adams learned this preheating trick from none other than her own grandma, who never baked cornbread without her signature skillet. “My big mama was the cast-iron queen,” she tells me. “Cast-iron skillets are wizards when it comes to providing even heat distribution and creating the most delicious crust you’ll ever taste,” Delk Adams says. You can bake cornbread in a regular cake pan, but you’d be missing out on some of those heat retention qualities—and it won’t stick, as long as your skillet is well-seasoned.Learn how to do it right), and if you don’t have a skillet yet,shop our favorites. And don’t hesitate to turn your leftover cornbreadinto croutons.
