Corn "Spoon" Bread Muffins
Tuesday, November 4, 2008 at 7:35AM 
I had one hit and one miss. I’ve been looking for a good, no wait…a great corn muffin recipe for years. I don’t want it sweet and I don’t want it dry. I thought I had it cracked with a recipe using fine ground white cornmeal. I even sent away for a bag of it. The postage cost more than the cornmeal, but it didn’t matter to me if it produced the cornmeal muffin of my dreams. The white cornmeal from J.T. Pollard in Alabama was light, ground almost as fine as flour and a joy to work with...well worth it!
The muffins turned out creamy, like custard inside. The recipe advised eating them within an hour; something nice for brunch, and that was exactly right. Thanks to the suggestion from Scott Peacock, eat warm with a little honey and butter…very, very nice. But still not what I was looking for.
So then I thought, well, I’d fine grind the yellow cornmeal I had on hand and use the same recipe. That didn’t work at all and produced dry, dense, hard muffins, which I threw out. So that was the big miss. For this purpose, white and yellow cornmeal were not interchangeable. While I liked these airy muffins, and would make them again, my quest continues for the cornmeal muffin recipe of my dreams.
Corn “spoon” Bread muffins
Makes 12 muffins
1-½ cups extra-fine grind white cornmeal
1-teaspoon baking soda
¾ teaspoon kosher salt
2-¼ cups buttermilk (shake well)
2 large eggs, beaten
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
Equipment: Standard 12 cup muffin pan
Preheat oven to 425°F with rack in middle. Butter muffin cups. Whisk cornmeal, baking soda and salt in a bowl. Whisk buttermilk into eggs, add to cornmeal mixture and whisk vigorously until smooth. Whisk in melted butter.
Divide batter among muffin cups and bake until edges begin to pull away from sides and a tester inserted to center of muffin comes out clean, 20-25 minutes. Turn muffins on to rack and serve warm.
Recipe adapted from Gourmet, January 2008
Mom’s Note: The muffins were nice the day after heated up for a bit. The corn flavor was slightly stronger. Also, 18 minutes was plenty of cooking time.
Cornmeal supplier: JT Pollard Milling Company 334-588-3391
Reader Comments (2)
These look absolutely heavenly!
They had a lovely light corn taste, and the inside was so soft...