Like baked acorn squash, cornbread is one of the foodstuffs that is tied to my paternal grandmother’s kitchen table in my memories. Unlike squash, however, I was sort of ambivalent towards cornbread as a child. Oh, I would always eat it if was placed it in front of me, but there was something about the dense, crumbly quality of cornbread that never really sat well with my picky childhood palate. Wasn’t bread supposed to be smooth and light, like a slice of Roman Meal Whole Wheat? Of course, I’ve since come around to cornbread’s virtues, particularly when it’s of the thicker, firmer variety that doesn’t fall apart when you bite into it.
A kernel of corn, or maize, is the fruit and seed of the annual flowering grass Zea mays. The plant is a member of the true grass family Poacaeae, which means that maize kernels are by definition a cereal. An ear of maize is kind of a strange beast, from a botanical anatomy point of view. Each ear consists of the fruit from a cluster of a few hundred female flowers (what botanists term an inflorescence). However, the maize kernels never fuse together into a single mass, as they do in figs, mulberries, pineapples, and other edible fruits that develop from flower clusters. This is fortunate for us humans, since the discreteness of the tiny maize kernel is one of the features that makes the grain so useful as a staple crop.
Maize is, of course, probably the single most important food crop to be cultivated in the Americas. There is disagreement about the origin of Z. mays, which genetic analysis has enlightened but not resolved. The plant may be the result of a direct domestication of a single wild Zea species, or a hybridization of multiple Zea species, or a hybridization with a related genus. Regardless, archaeological evidence suggests that Z. mays cultivation began around 9,000 years ago (7,000 BCE) in the Balsas River valley of southeastern Mexico. Maize cultivation seems to have taken off in the second millennium BCE, when the grain began to spread rapidly throughout the Americas and the ears started to attain something closer to their current proportions. By the second millennium, A.D., maize was the staple crop of the Mississippian culture embodied at nearby Cahokia, some 1,500 miles or so from the plant’s point of origin. While maize’s need for a relatively warm climate precluded its cultivation in the far north or south of the Western hemisphere, it’s fair to say that corn had conquered the Americas by the time of European contact.
I recently had a particular craving for cornbread muffins with blueberry jam, which seemed like a nice complement for a sweeter, smoother sort of muffin. Accordingly, I shied away from recipes that used whole corn, cheese, or spices. Patrick and Gina Neely’s Honey Cornbread Muffins seemed like a good starting point.
When cooking from an American origin, wheat is out, which means that you're essentially doing gluten-free baking. Subtract rice, barley, sorghum, oats, rye, and so on, and New World baking can be a real challenge. For the all-purpose flour, I substituted 3/4 cup of corn flour, 2 tablespoons of tapioca flour, and 2 tablespoons of quinoa flour. Using tapioca is cheating a bit, since the cassava from which it is made is native to South America and the Caribbean. However, tapioca contributes to the thickening the batter would normally get from eggs, adds a distinctive sweet sort of flavor, and helps with the texture of the finished product. Quinoa constitutes a bit of a cheat too, since it is from the Andes Mountains. However, a closely related species, pitseed goosefoot (Chenopodium berlandieri), was evidently domesticated in the present-day eastern United States before falling out of favor with the arrival of corn and beans. The quinoa available in supermarkets today is about as close as we're going to get to that heirloom grain. Quinoa flour is sort of sharp-smelling, but in baking it provides a really flavorful nutty quality. I mainly threw it in for a little variety. (Gluten-free baking seems to thrive on flour blends.)
I swapped water for milk, and added a tablespoon of corn oil to compensate for the loss of milk fat. Instead of eggs, I used 4 tablespoons of corn starch and a bit more water. In most instances, one would use equal parts corn starch and water to substitute for eggs, but I went a little light on water to compensate for the for fact that I used maple syrup instead of sugar and honey. Instead of using more oil in place of the butter, I went with sunflower butter, which added a bit of a "peanut butter-ish" flavor to the mix.
My final, modified ingredient list goes:
- 1 cup Bob's Red Mill Medium Cornmeal
- 1/2 cup Bob's Red Mill Corn Flour
- 1/4 cup Bob's Red Mill Tapioca Flour
- 1/4 cup Bob's Red Mill Quinoa Flour
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
- 1/2 cup + 2 tablespoons SpringTree Grade A Maple Syrup
- 1 teaspoon kosher salt
- 1 cup + 1 tablespoon water
- 1 tablespoon Mazola Corn Oil
- 4 tablespoons Argo Corn Starch
- 1/4 cup + 2 tablespoons Sunbutter Organic Sunflower Seed Spread
The result was pretty good, way better than I was anticipating for a first try. The muffins rose nicely for a recipe with no wheat flour; I was afraid I'd end up with little hockey pucks. The combination of the expected classic cornbread sweetness with the maple, sunflower, and quinoa flavors is really appealing. If anything, the sunflower butter was a little more prominent than I intended, and the overall impression is "cornbread plus peanut butter, but not quite."
My main complaint is that the muffins still ended up pretty crumbly, which I think is partly attributable to my forgetting one of my "fake eggs". I added just two tablespoons of corn starch instead of four (D'oh!), which means there wasn't as much binding as there should have been. Other than that, the only thing I might change on the next try is to swap some of the sunflower butter for corn or sunflower oil, to reduce that "peanut-buttery" aspect of the flavor a bit.
In the next post, I'll get to the no-pectin quickie blueberry jam that was the real reason for making these muffins in the first place.
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