Bake Boxed Cornbread In Your Cast Iron Skillet For An Instant Upgrade

While jamming with Food Network host Kardea Brown at the Nassau Paradise Island Wine & Food Festival, Foodie got her expert opinions on doctoring boxed cornbread in ways that will transform it completely. The key, Brown tells us, is baking in a well-greased cast iron pan. While you can add chili paste to boxed cornbread for a side dish with a spicy kick, the star feature of Brown's take on cornbread is the scrumptious crispy edges.

"I grew up eating ... Jiffy, my grandmother's absolute favorite," Brown says. "I have no problem with it." But simply following the instructions on the blue box isn't going to result in cornbread that makes your family hoot and holler. For that, you need cast iron, and either butter or bacon grease. "[T]hat cast iron skillet has to be, like, oiled down, greased up," Brown says. To achieve that, you can use two or three tablespoons of butter — your choice of variety, although we have ranked the best butter brands from the grocery store if you're curious — or full-send the down-home cooking route and use rendered bacon fat after frying up your breakfast. Either way, the sizzling fat and hot cast iron will result in the prized crispiness that separates homemade cornbread from the uninspired, pale pablum you usually get with a boxed mix. But that's not the extent of Brown's wisdom. To further upgrade your skillet cornbread, she says, you need to sweeten it up some.

Brown's aforementioned grandmother made sweet cornbread that was closer to a cake, she remembers. How can a home cook go about achieving the same results with boxed mix? "Add a little sugar to it, and then, also, if you want to make it cake-like, I would say add a little bit of cake flour," she said. Without an exact recipe, this is definitely an experiment for more seasoned home cooks who have honed their personal "feel" for how much a baking formula can be tinkered with without fundamentally changing the outcome. Still, we're intrigued by the vision of cornbread that Brown conjures: sweet, dense, and crisp at the edges thanks to that hot cast iron skillet.

Some amateur cooks are intimidated by the upkeep of cast iron, but this tool for cooking is almost 2,000 years old and way more user-friendly than you'd expect. Martha Stewart uses Crisco to season her cast iron, but you needn't be a TV-famous kitchen heavyweight to enjoy the benefits of cast iron: durability and delicious cooking results. A scenario like Kardea Brown's cast iron cornbread invites a bit of playfulness and experimentation in the kitchen since there are no carved-in-stone instructions. With a boxed mix, a lot of the work is already done for you. So, what better time to take your cast iron out for a whirl?