This 1 Change Makes My Go-To Cornbread Recipe a Family Favorite

There’s one recipe I always keep in my back pocket to complete a meal if I feel like I need more on the table—cornbread. It goes with so many dishes. Of course, it’s required if I make chili, but it also goes with so many other meals. 

Bacon and eggs for breakfast? Chicken noodle soup for lunch? Barbecue chicken or meatloaf for dinner? Cornbread goes with any of those dishes. Anytime I make cornbread, half of it is bound to be gone by the end of the meal, and various family members head into the kitchen throughout the rest of the day to keep snacking on it. There’s rarely any left the next day.

Make Cornbread with Kitchen Staples

One of the reasons cornbread became one of my most made side dishes for any meal is that I always have the ingredients on hand. As long as I keep cornmeal in my pantry, I’m never without the other ingredients—flour, sugar, baking powder, milk, oil, eggs, and salt. 

Many cornbread recipes call for buttermilk, but my go-to is plain milk because I rarely have buttermilk on hand. I know you can turn regular milk into sour milk to substitute for buttermilk in recipes, but it’s an extra step I don’t want to take when throwing together cornbread. One of the things I love about the cornbread I make is that it takes five minutes at most to mix up the batter. It cooks in about 20 minutes, so it’s less than a half hour from start to finish. 

The 1 Change I Make to This Popular Cornbread Recipe

I’ve been making Golden Sweet Cornbread for my family for over a decade. With 2/3 cup of sugar in the recipe, it’s certainly named well. It’s moist and delicious. A hot-out-of-the-oven slice with regular butter or honey butter is the definition of comfort food. 

I change just one thing that the original recipe calls for, and it’s not an ingredient. Rather than baking it in a 9-inch round cake pan, I bake it in a 12-inch cast iron skillet. This does two things. 

It makes the finished cornbread a bit thinner, so 20 minutes is the perfect cooking time (when I’ve done it in the cake pan, it takes closer to 25 minutes.) It also creates a larger surface area for a crispy top that’s a bit caramelized (because of the amount of sugar in the recipe) and makes the BEST crispy edges, and more of them. I cut the cornbread in wedges like a cake, so every single piece has a bit of that satisfying crispy edge.

How Allrecipes Members Switch Up Golden Sweet Cornbread

I love the ingredients just as they are, but our community loves to be creative in the kitchen, and they also love to tell us about it in the comments. Here are just a few ways that our members put their own spin on this cornbread recipe. Even if they make tweaks, our members overwhelmingly love this cornbread recipe as much as I do.

Some members add extra ingredients. Sarah Red Dezelin adds pickled jalapeños on top before baking. Another member adds tablespoons of melted butter to the batter so the cornbread doesn't get too crumbly. Lucy Footery—who has made this recipe for over 20 years—adds a 4-ounce can of diced green chiles "to get a sweet/spicy flavor."

Other members make substitutions. Some substitute an equal amount of butter for the oil. Another substitute is coconut milk and brown sugar for the milk and white sugar. For those who don't like their cornbread to be "crumbly," member Jeremy Joseph suggests adding one additional egg white and only two teaspoons of baking powder. Some members had success with substituting alternative flours for the white flour, such as Bob's Red Mill 1-to-1 Baking Flour.

If you're now craving cornbread and trying to decide what to make tonight just so you can serve it, may I suggest this Spicy Black Bean Vegetable Soup made with canned beans for ease? The cornbread will go so well with it, and the timing of the two recipes is perfect.