Loaded Corn Bread

Remember what I said about the Brown Butter Corn Muffins being a bit “vanilla”? Well the Loaded Corn Bread is easily Claire’s elevated version for people already acquainted with cornbread.

This version has a lot of ingredients I’ve personally never tried in cornbread before, such as bacon, scallions, cilantro and jalapeño chile (likely because I’ve always enjoyed cornbread in the south, not the southwest). I have one big cast iron skillet that’s 12 or 14 inches, so the cornbread batter definitely spaced out thinner using this size, however it was convenient cooking the recipe with this one pan.

After cooking up the bacon, I threw in the corn, scallions and jalapeño chile. This time I just used frozen corn, but it didn’t seem to make a major difference. Remember to be careful using a cast iron for all of this, it’s easy to forget how hot the handle will get when you’re in the midst of cooking!

I mixed the dry ingredients in one bowl, the wet in another, then combined them in the dry ingredients bowl. It wasn’t very easy lifting that big skillet to scrape the bacon and veggies into the batter, but nevertheless, I conquered it. Once that was mixed, I added a little butter to the skillet (with bacon already in there, I didn’t feel it needed much more fat), and added the batter into the skillet. I placed the skillet into the oven and baked it for about 23 minutes.

Like any cornbread, this recipe definitely needs something like sour cream to compliment it when it’s eaten. Mine seemed to turn out kind of dry, which may have been related to the skillet being so large. Personally, I’m not a big fan of having thick ingredients like bacon and corn in a bread recipe; I like bread to be smooth on its own in texture. If you’re familiar with cornbread, this may be an interesting take to try, but like many others, I prefer something a little more old school.

Claire is very upfront about this recipe not being a traditional corn bread. Check out her YouTube video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JO1YeONclmg