This Sweet Ingredient Has No Place In Traditional Cornbread

We may receive a commission on purchases made from links.

Cornbread is a quintessentially American bread with roots in Mesoamerican, Native American, and African cultures, stretching back thousands of years. Early cornbread consisted of cornmeal, water, and salt and was baked over a fire or in a hearth. When European settlers arrived and struggled to grow wheat in unfamiliar soil, they adopted this Native tradition, eventually enriching the basic recipe with milk, eggs, butter, and leavening agents to create the beloved comfort food we know today — from sweet Northern varieties to savory Southern skillets.

Today, you might want to cook your cornbread in cast iron for the extra iron intake, and while some modern cornbread recipes do call for sugar, it's not a necessity. After all, sugar has no place in cornbread if you're using the right cornmeal. Sugar has been (sometimes) traditionally added to cornbread because of the corn milling process. But, if you get your cornmeal stone-ground, it has all the sweetness you need, so you don't have to add any sugar.

You need stone-ground cornmeal because it leaves much of the kernel intact. Leaving the germ and much of the kernel means more flavor, so you don't need the sugar. Sugar has been an additive for overly processed corn, such as steel-rolled corn, which leaves a lot of the taste behind. However, a good stone-ground cornmeal, such as Indian Head Yellow Corn Meal or Bob's Red Mill Coarse Grind Cornmeal gives you all the flavor you need.

Cornbread should be cooked in a cast iron skillet. It's not a necessity, but it gives you more flavor and cooks pretty evenly. Use a full-fat buttermilk for extra tang, about 1.75 cups of cornmeal to 2 cups buttermilk. If you want to add some extra flavor, you can cook some bacon in the pan first, but coating it with butter also works great. Mix an egg into your batter with a dash of salt and baking soda. Cook the batter on the stovetop for a few minutes, then put it in the oven at 375 degrees Fahrenheit until golden-brown. It should come out flaky and delicious. It's perfect with a little bacon or mixed with a full-on seafood feast.