Cornbread and Cast Iron

I have been reading Michael Pollan’s book, Cooked. It begins with lofty questions like….”what is the most important thing an ordinary person can do to help reform the American food system to make it healthier and more sustainable?” And, “…how can we acquire a deeper understanding of the natural world and our species’ peculiar role in it?” Rather than going to the woods to confront these questions, Pollan decided he could find more interesting answers by exploring the “previously uncharted territory of his own kitchen.” His exploration took him to the barbeque pits of North Carolina, the braise pots of a self-described obsessive-compulsive chef, the cellar of a microbiologist-cheesemaker, the sauerkraut crocks of Sandor Katz, the wood-fired oven of “the bread monk”, and a “mad scientist” brewer…all his mentors are people who seek “the deepest, farthest, richest flavors in everything…” I love this book as a cookbook, even though–or maybe because– there are only four recipes. Who needs more than four recipes, anyway? I love it because it makes you want to cook. Anything.

Where to start? “When you find something that is easy to make, healthful, and tastes great, go with it,” say Chris Schlesinger and John Willoughby, authors of Salsas, Sambals, Chutneys, and Chowchow. Cornbread falls in that category…and salsa to go with it. Two of the most humble, beloved, and inseparable staples of my kitchen are cornbread and the cast-iron skillet I cook it in. Cornbread is easy, healthful, and great tasting…and it’s always better homemade and straight out of the oven. Mix it up, pour the batter in a hot pan, and pop it in the oven. The keys to great cornbread are good tasting cornmeal and a hot cast-iron skillet.

How do you get good-tasting cornmeal? Look for organically grown, stone-ground cornmeal–freshly milled, if possible. My cornbread really took a flavor leap when I started grinding my own cornmeal from homegrown corn. This year I have had Hopi Blue, Oaxaca Green, and Floriani (a red Italian flint corn) to play with. I grind the corn with a hand-cranked mill, or electric spice grinder if I just want a cup or so. The resulting meal is somewhat gritty, so I sift it through a sieve and set the larger chunks aside for polenta. Freshly ground cornmeal is wonderfully fragrant and full of corn flavor. Plus, it comes in different colors!

There are two basic approaches to making cornbread. The more common way is to use half unbleached all-purpose wheat flour and half cornmeal in the recipe to get lighter and firmer bread. The second way is to go with 100% corn, which is more crumbly (possibly gritty, depending on the milling) but very flavorful. Each has their fans.

Cornmeal itself comes in different textures, depending on the type of corn and how it was ground. Dent corn has a floury interior and softer hull than flint corn, which has a very hard outer layer that breaks into chunks (grits). I like to combine different textures, especially when using 100% cornmeal.  Flour-like cornmeal helps hold the bread together, and grittier meal contributes interesting texture.

Basic Cornbread

Ingredients: 1 cup unbleached all-purpose wheat flour, 1 cup cornmeal (or use 2 cups cornmeal and omit the wheat flour), 1/2 tsp salt, 1/2 tsp baking soda, 2 1/2 tsp baking powder, 1 large egg, 1/4 cup vegetable oil, 1 1/2 cups buttermilk or kefir (or 1 cup yogurt thinned with 1/2 milk), 2 tsp butter plus 1 tsp oil

Heat the oven to 400 degrees F. Heat a 9 to 10-inch iron skillet over a medium flame on the stovetop while you mix the batter. In a large bowl, mix together the flour (if using), cornmeal, salt, soda, and baking powder. In another bowl, lightly beat the egg and whisk in the oil and buttermilk. Pour the liquid into the dry ingredients and stir as briefly as possible to combine.

When the pan is hot and the batter is ready, add the butter and oil and swirl to coat the pan. Pour the batter into the skillet (it should sizzle) and transfer to the oven. Bake 25 to 30 minutes, until golden brown and delicious smelling.

What to eat on your cornbread: Some folks like to slather cornbread with honey, sorghum molasses, or apple butter. We like to top our cornbread with something spicy–any salsa or chile sauce will do, but cooked salsas are particularly good. Salsa with a smear of soft cheese is even better.

Roasted Tomatillo-Chipotle Salsa

Tomatillos and corn are a good example of “what grows together goes together.” The citrus-sharp flavor of tomatillos makes this salsa a perfect topping for earthy-sweet cornbread. Roasting mellows the tartness of tomatillos, and blended with dry-roasted garlic and smoky chipotle chiles, these are flavors made in heaven.

Ingredients: 10 to12 medium tomatillos (husked and rinsed), 4 unpeeled garlic cloves, 3 to 6 canned chipotles en adobo, 2 to 4 Tbs finely chopped white onion, 2 Tbs roughly chopped cilantro, salt to taste

Heat a heavy griddle or skillet over medium heat. Roast the garlic and tomatillos directly on the hot pan, turning occasionally, until blackened in spots and soft. Tomatillos will take about 10 minutes, garlic about 15. Alternatively, place the tomatillos on a baking sheet under a hot broiler for about 5 minutes per side.

For a smooth sauce, use a blender to puree the tomatillos, peeled garlic, and chipotle chiles. For a chunky, rustic sauce that surprises your taste buds with chipotle explosions, use a mortar and pestle. Crush the garlic and chipotles together before working in the tomatillos. Season with salt, and stir in the onion and cilantro.

Roasted Tomato-Serrano Salsa

Grilled vine-ripe tomatoes are great, but pan-roasted still gives a toasted flavor to this salsa. Don’t worry if there are specks of charred skin–they are part of the deliciousness factor.

Ingredients: 8 ripe plum tomatoes (or 1 14-oz can fire-roasted diced tomatoes), 1 small white onion, 2 to 4 serrano chiles, 2 or 3 unpeeled garlic cloves, a handful chopped cilantro, fresh lime juice, salt

Heat a heavy skillet over medium heat. Roast the tomatoes directly on the skillet, turning from time to time, until blistered and charred–about 10 minutes. Set aside to cool. Slice the onion into rings about 1/4-inch thick. Place the onion, chiles, and garlic on the hot skillet and roast, turning occasionally, until blackened  in spots and soft–5 to 10 minutes for the chiles and onion, 15 for the garlic.

Peel the tomatoes and coarsely chop, saving the juices. Chop the onion. Use a mortar and pestle to crush and grind the chiles and peeled garlic with 1/2 tsp coarse salt to make a rough paste. Add the chopped tomatoes and onion and crush lightly to combine. Season with lime juice and salt to taste and stir in the cilantro.

Quark

Quark is a fresh, soft cow’s milk cheese that has been described as “mascarpone meets sour cream meets yogurt”–tangy and creamy at the same time. It is light enough to eat like yogurt and thick enough to spread on bread (maybe with a few leaves of arugula and a slice of tomato).

I made quark with a half-gallon of raw milk that my daughter, Naomi, got from a nice cow in Marshall. The milk was already sour, so we just let it sit out overnight to get thick. When the curd began to pull away from the sides of the jar, I ladled it into a cheesecloth-lined colander and stuck it in the refrigerator to drain. It was that easy.

You can make quark with fresh raw milk or any store bought milk (lower fat milk yields a drier cheese) by letting the milk acidify (sour) and thicken with the help of a culture. The culture can come from buttermilk or a commercial culture from a cheese supply company like New England Cheesemaking Supply (who also supply detailed instructions). Heat milk slowly to 86 degrees F. Stir in 1 cup cultured buttermilk for every 4 cups milk, or follow directions on the culture pack. Allow the milk to cool to about 70 degrees F and hold at that temperature 12 to 24 hours while the curd coagulates. When a thin layer of whey forms on the surface and the curd pulls away from the sides, it is ready to drain. Transfer the curd to a colander lined with clean muslin or cheesecloth and allow to drain 4 to 12 hours. Refrigeration during this time produces a milder flavored cheese. Scrape the cheese from the sides of the cloth occasionally for better draining. Taste the cheese along the way and stop the process when the texture suits your taste. You can add sour cream to the finished quark for a richer tasting cheese.

Blending plain yogurt, cream cheese or Neufchatel, and sour cream or buttermilk can make an approximation of quark.  In a bowl, mash together 4 oz cream cheese (made without guar gum) and 2 to 4 Tbs sour cream with a fork. Gently stir in 1 cup thick yogurt and 1 tsp fresh lemon juice.

You can make sweet quark by stirring in a little honey or maple syrup. Or, try it with chopped fresh fruit or preserves. I like to mix a little salt, lemon zest, minced garlic, and chopped fresh herbs. Sweet or savory, it’s a great topping for cornbread.

Making Masa with Kelley

One of my most memorable meals ever was eaten on the street in Mexico City. An Indian woman sat on the sidewalk beside an open fire and a heavy iron griddle. She patted out a blue corn tortilla, tossed it onto the griddle, and cooked it while I waited. She covered the hot tortilla with a crumbly white cheese and a sprinkling of red chile and handed it to me. It was perfect.

I was really excited to learn that my friend Kelley has become a tortilla aficionado and that she would let me come over and show me how to turn corn into masa (the dough for making tortillas). Kelley takes “real” and “local” seriously when it comes to food. She likes to grow what she eats and has planted so many different fruits and vegetables that she often doesn’t have to stop for meals–she just nibbles her way through the garden and greenhouse. That’s how I learned how delicious the seedpods of daikon are, not to mention gotu kola leaves, oca, and my new favorite vegetable, yakon.

Kelley is both serious and joyful about corn, as it is an important part of her diet. She grows open-pollinated, heirloom corn varieties with names like Oaxacan Green, Hopi Blue, Bloody Butcher, and Calais Flint. As I admired the ears of corn with kernels in jewel tones of blue, red, yellow and green, I could understand how Native American tribes would regard corn as a gift from the creator and want to identify themselves as “People of the Corn”. Selected for hardiness and flavor for generations, these corns survive in the modern world of hybrid and GMO corn because they are so good, and because there are farmers and gardeners like Kelley who are hungry for authentic taste and willing to go the extra mile to save seed.

Kelley explained that there are two basic kinds of dry field corn: dent and flint. Dent corn has a soft starchy interior that is easily ground into flour, cornmeal, and masa for tortillas. It’s also good roasted in the milk stage or parched when dry. Flint corn is flinty hard and excels when ground into grits and polenta. This year I grew a flint corn called “Floriani”, a family heirloom brought to this country from the Valsugana Valley of Italy, where it was the staple polenta corn. Floriani cobs have beautiful red pointed kernels with a rich, corny flavor. Kelley and I decided to make masa with my Floriani corn and her Hope Blue Dent for comparison.

This is what we did: We started by cutting off the husks, saving the larger ones for wrapping tomales. We ran the ears through a corn sheller to get the kernels off the cob, cranked the kernels through a Rube Goldberg antique seed cleaner, and put the cleaned corn into a big pot of cold water with a few spoonfuls of slaked lime (pickling lime). Boiling the corn with lime for 1/2 hour softens the kernels and loosens the outer skins. After 30 minutes, the heat is turned off and the corn soaks in the limewater 4 to 8 hours (or overnight). After soaking, the kernels are drained and rinsed thoroughly in cold water, rubbing to remove as many skins as possible. At this point the corn is called hominy.

Now the corn is ready to be made into masa (the dough for making into tortillas). I have a hand-cranked corn mill, but Kelley has an electric one, so we poured the whole kernels into the mill, and two metal plates ground it into coarse, wet meal. Kelley put the meal through the mill a second time to make smoother dough. Kelley adds water “until you think you have added too much” and shapes the wet dough into a ball. The ball is covered with a towel and allowed to sit 10 or 15 minutes while the water is absorbed and the dough becomes more plastic and workable.

Making tortillas: Kelley heated a large iron griddle over high heat on the stovetop. We pinched off lumps of masa and rolled them into balls the size of a large walnut. The balls are flattened, patted on both sides, and placed on a tortilla press between two sheets of plastic to be pressed flat and thin. When the griddle is hot, the tortilla is peeled off the plastic and slid onto the hot iron. Each tortilla cooks 30 seconds on the first side. When the edges begin to curl up, it is turned over to cook the second side a minute or so. Finally, it is flipped over and tapped gently for about 15 seconds to encourage puffing. Keep the cooked tortillas warm, wrapped in a thick kitchen towel, until they are all cooked. Kelley says it’s best to let them rest a bit, but I like to eat them right away.

Of course, you can make quite good tortillas with dried masa found in most grocery stores in a 5 lb. bag, or from fresh masa sometimes available in a Mexican food store. Follow the directions on the bag (though I add more water than the instructions say).

I took my pile of mustard-yellow tortillas home and ate them with black beans and a sauté of sweet potato, onion, and chard. A salsa of yakon and another of roasted tomato added piquancy and crunch. Chopped cilantro and fresh lime wedges are essential!

Other memorable taco combinations:

*Trout and chopped broccoli with queso fresca

*Fried fish roe and spinach with ricotta salata

*Andouille sausage ragu and roasted asparagus spears

*Mushrooms and kale with smoked Gouda cheese

*Garlicky chard with roasted poblano and potato

*Spicy guacamole and blue cheese

Yakon Salsa/Salad

Kelley gave me a couple of yakon plants (Smallanthus sonchifolius) in the spring, grown from tubers she over-wintered in the greenhouse. The plants, a distant relative of sunflowers, grew a robust 6 feet tall in my garden. I dug them in the late fall to uncover a huge cluster of sweet potato-like tubers under each plant. The harvest filled a garden cart, which I hauled up to the root cellar. The tubers, sometimes called Peruvian ground apples, are crisp and juicy…kind of like a jicama, which is kind of like a big radish with no radish heat. In other words, yakon is mostly about crunchy texture and a great ability to absorb flavors.

Ingredients: 1 large yakon or medium jicama (about 1 lb.), 1 small red onion, 1 or 2 jalapeno or serrano chiles, 1 medium red bell pepper, 1 lime (2 or3 Tbs. fresh lime juice), 1 or 2 handfuls chopped cilantro, salt. Optional additions: 1 orange (sectioned, membranes removed), 4 or 5 thinly sliced radishes or 1 daikon cut in matchsticks, slices of avocado, chopped arugula

Peel the yakon or jicama. Cut into quarters, slice thinly, and cut the slices into matchsticks. Cut the onion in half, slice thinly, soak in cold water if very pungent, and drain. Seed and mince the hot chiles. Thinly slice or dice the bell pepper. Toss everything together in a bowl, sprinkle with salt, and add fresh lime juice to taste. Add the chopped cilantro and any other additional ingredients.

Charred Tomato Salsa

I make this with vine-ripe plum tomatoes from the summer garden. In winter, I use canned or frozen fire-roasted tomatoes.

Ingredients: 1 1/2 lb. (6 or 7 plum tomatoes) or 1 can diced fire-roasted tomatoes, 4 medium unpeeled garlic cloves, 2 jalapeno or 3-4 serrano chiles, 1 small white onion, 1/3 cup chopped cilantro, salt, fresh lime juice

If using fresh tomatoes, put them close under a hot broiler or over a grill fire, turning frequently, until the skin is blistered and charred in spots. Remove the skins and chop to use in the salsa, saving all the juices.

Place a small iron skillet over medium heat. Slice the onion about 1/3-inch thick and arrange the onion slices, chiles, and garlic cloves on the skillet. Dry-roast until softened and charred in patches, about 10 minutes for the chiles and onion, 15 minutes for the garlic. Turn them over half way through roasting. Peel the garlic, seed the chiles, and use a knife or food processor to chop finely, along with the onion. Add the tomatoes and the cilantro and stir or pulse to combine. Season with salt and lime juice to taste.

Roasted Tomatillo Salsa

Tomatillos (Physalis ixocarpa) are sometimes called Mexican green tomatoes. They are not tomatoes at all, but a small citrusy green fruit that grows inside a papery husk on low, sprawling plants. They are easy to grow and easy to find in Mexican and most American grocery stores. They are most tart when green (the way they are sold in grocery stores), but sweeten slightly as they turn yellow. The less common purple variety is smaller, with a more intense flavor. You can use fresh or frozen tomatillos to make this salsa. Kelley puts her frozen tomatillos directly onto a hot griddle to pan-roast.

Ingredients: 1 lb. tomatillos (8 to 12, husked and rinsed), 4 medium unpeeled garlic cloves, hot chiles to taste (1 jalapeno, 2 serranos, or more), 1/2 cup finely chopped white onion,  1/3 cup chopped cilantro, and salt

Optional additions/substitutions: lime juice, 1 or 2 chipotle chiles en adobo, 1 or 2 roasted/peeled/seeded poblano chiles, 1 or 2 roasted/grilled green onions.

Heat a large iron or non-stick skillet over medium-high heat. Dry-roast the tomatillos and garlic cloves until well browned and soft (3-4 minutes per side for the tomatillos, 6 or 7 minutes per side for the garlic).  Put the tomatillos and peeled garlic in a blender or food processor with the seeded and chopped chiles, 1/2 tsp salt, and any optional additions. Blend to a coarse puree. Add the cilantro and chopped onion and pulse to combine. Add fresh lime juice to taste, and water if you want a thinner sauce.

Tomatillo salsa is great in guacamole, with scrambled eggs and cornbread, mixed with cooked chicken or fish, or added to lentil soups.

Corpus Christy Chiles

Our friend Phil has an aunt down in Corpus Christy that makes a fabulous condiment known simply as “Chiles”. No meal is complete without it. Phil didn’t give quantities other than “some” and “a few”, so I made an experiment using the following proportions.

Ingredients: 1 tsp whole cumin seed, 1/2 tsp black peppercorns, coarse sea salt, 3 chopped garlic cloves, 2 or 3 small hot chiles (chiles pequin or bird chiles for more heat, jalapeno or serrano for moderate heat), fresh lime juice or cider vinegar, water

Dry-roast the cumin and peppercorns on an iron skillet over medium heat until toasted and fragrant, about 1 minute. Be sure to shake the pan or stir the spices often to prevent burning. When cool, use a mortar and pestle to grind them to a powder with a generous pinch of coarse salt. Add the chopped garlic and pound to make a paste. Add the chopped chiles (seeded or not, according to your heat comfort) and mash them into the paste. Add one or two tsp. lime juice or cider vinegar and 4 or 5 Tbs water to make a thin sauce.

My sauce was extra delicious– fresh tasting and fruity– because I used about a Tbs or so of our friend Justin’s homemade smoked red jalapeno salsa (just smoked red jalapeno peppers and vinegar).  I tried two more experiments: I added a few Tbs fresh orange juice to the sauce (very good–a great dressing for a yakon-carrot salad), and I stirred a few spoonfuls of the sauce into a small bowl of extra virgin olive oil for dipping bread (wow!).

**Kelley will be teaching a class called “Mother Corn” for the Asheville Organic Growers School in early March.