Does browned butter improve cornbread?

Time: 1 hour 15 minutes

Ingredient Availability: 5/5

Difficulty: 1/5

I’ve only made a couple cornbread recipes for this blog, so far. Up to this point, none have been particularly impressive. This one from An Unapologetic Cookbook has some more promise with its herb infused browned butter. This cookbook has had a few hits and a few big misses, so I’m not completely confident that this will be better than the others I’ve reviewed.

Key Ingredients & Omissions:

I guess the key ingredients in this recipe would be the herbs: thyme and sage. Other than that, I would say that the rest of the ingredients aren’t really as surprise to be seen in a cornbread recipe. Nothing was difficult to find.

Tools:

• Cast Iron Pan

Cooking Review

Browning Butter and Mixing Dry Ingredients: 19 minutes

This step shouldn’t take you this long. Just like melting butter in the microwave, you need to be pretty careful to not take it too far at once, as you’re at risk of making a big mess when the butter suddenly explodes. That’s what happened to me, so I had to pause to clean up. After cleaning up, I finished mixing the dry ingredients together and focused on browning the butter. The recipe says until it’s dark brown, but I know that you can burn it easily if you let it get dark brown on the heat and take it off. The butter will continue to darken when taken off the heat, so just take it until its decently brown. Once I took the butter off the heat, I added the herbs to steep. At this point, I put the cast iron pan into the oven while it preheated.

Mixing Batter: 12 minutes

While the butter cooled, I mixed the wet ingredients in a separate bowl. I removed the herbs from the butter and whisked the wet ingredients while I poured the butter in. Finally, I added the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and whisked until combined.

Baking: 23 minutes

I took the cast iron out of the oven and poured in the cornbread batter. Once I returned it to the oven, I let it bake for 23 minutes.

Cooling: 20 minutes

I let the cornbread cool for about 20 minutes in the pan before attempting to transfer it to a cooling rack. As you can see, this didn’t go as planned and the cornbread fell apart partially.

Analysis:

The cornbread is pretty similar to a cake. It’s very soft with no crispiness at all. While the specific flavor of the browned butter doesn’t really come through, the sage and thyme really do. Despite the two sugars used in this cornbread, it’s only slightly sweet. I definitely like this cornbread more than the others I’ve reviewed to this point. I really enjoy the sage and thyme flavor infused throughout it and I don’t really mind that it’s on the cakey side. I’ll give this a 8/10. It sets itself apart from most other cornbreads with its unique herby flavor, but still isn’t blowing me away.

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