The Cornbread Lab Manual is available under the Bake tab on the home page and HERE.
Cornbread Lab is second of the Home Ec Labs we are teaching in Nashville. Our labs tackle one topic a time (biscuits, cornbread, pie crust, barbecue,) and for about two hours we and our lab partners explore the backstories of foods, ingredients, and cooking methods, and we test a variety of recipes that fully explore a topic. The hands-on test kitchen approach allows participants to see how ingredients work together, how modifying the ingredients alters the results and ultimately helping folks determine for themselves the approach that best suits them. Like the mission of the historic land grant university home economics programs across the country, we hope to share ideas that improve the quality of family life.
Corn is everywhere. It can be found it fuel, sweetener, salty snacks, whiskey, toothpaste, paint, spark plugs, drywall…..we can’t fully imagine it’s role in our culture. Why else is the Iowa caucus so critical in our presidential primaries? It’s not just because it’s the first contest.
Despite being surrounded with our genetically modified native grain we’re out of touch with its more basic uses and the ways that it has kept us and cultures around the globe alive and surviving for centuries. The daily batch of cornbread is now an occasional batch from a convenient blue box.
So, with our Cornbread Lab and lab manual we hope to get you using cornmeal more often. In it you’ll find great recipes for all style of cornbread–thin crispy hot skillet, yankee, corn light, and loaded, spoonbread, cornmeal pancakes, hot water hoe cakes, Rhode Island Johnny Cakes, crepes, muffins, waffles, Southern cornbread dressing, cornbread salad, and Mindy’s Nashville Cornmeal Cookies.
A few images from Cornbread Lab courtesy of Michele Parvisi (www.msbelly.com)
