Gluten-Free Cornbread

What better way to follow up one 'corny' post than with one about corn bread? After playing at the corn maze all afternoon yesterday, I was thrilled to come home to a crock-pot full of chili that I'd started that morning. However, chili isn't the same without cornbread. I bought a bag of locally grown and ground blue cornmeal as well as a carton of farm-fresh eggs from the farmer's market this Friday with cornbread in mind.

Since going gluten-free, I've tried several store-bought GF cornbread mixes, but they were chewy or dry or basically not as wonderful as the beloved Jiffy cornbread mix I grew up on. So I bit the bullet and made cornbread from scratch, which I've never done before. And the results were so fantastic, I doubt I'll buy a boxed mix again!

This recipe was borne from an accumulation of Google searches and a stroke of good luck. Fresh ingredients don't hurt, either.

Gluten-Free Cornbread

1 cup oat flour (you can buy this at the store, or just toss a cup of raw gluten-free oatmeal in the food processor)
3/4 cup finely ground corn meal (mine was blue, hence the less-than-golden coloring)
2 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp xantham gum (optional)
3/4 tsp salt
2 eggs
1/4 cup butter
3 Tbs honey
1 cup milk

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees and place a pie tin on the top rack.

Mix the oat flour, corn meal, baking powder, xantham gum, and salt well in a medium bowl.

In a small bowl, melt the butter and honey in the microwave for about 30 seconds.

In a large bowl, beat the eggs until frothy and then slowly blend in the butter/honey mixture and the milk. Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and stir until just incorporated.

Remove the pan from the oven and coat lightly with cooking spray. Pour batter into pan (it will be as moist as cake batter) and bake for 16-20 minutes.

This recipe is everything I could want out of cornbread: a slightly chewy crust and a soft, fine-crumb center. In fact, this was much less crumbly than other gluten-filled cornbread I've had in the past! It even earned a compliment from Ross after I kept obsessively asking him if he'd eat it again and if he could tell it was gluten-free. He said he can't even tell that my recipes are gluten-free anymore. After my recent cookie success and now this bread, I hope that means that my recipes are just plain good and not that he's so used to sub-par baked goods these days that anything decent becomes delicious.

Anyway. I hope you love this bread as much as I did!