Skillet Cornbread.

Name: Skillet Cornbread (Unsweetened Southern Cast-Iron Bread)
Prep time: 10 min
Cook time: 25 min
Total time: 35 min
Yield: 8 servings
Cuisine: United States
Ingredients: 60 g butter, for the skillet; 300 g medium stone-ground cornmeal; 60 g plain flour; 2 tsp baking powder; ½ tsp bicarbonate of soda; 1½ tsp fine salt; 450 ml buttermilk; 2 large eggs; 40 g butter, melted and cooled

Unsweetened Southern Cast-Iron Bread

· say it: CORN-bred

Southern skillet cornbread is a savory bread made almost entirely of cornmeal, mixed in one bowl and poured into a cast-iron pan so hot the batter hisses when it lands. That hiss is the whole technique — the fat in the pan fries the outside into a deep golden crust while the inside bakes into a crumb that is tender, slightly coarse and faintly tangy from buttermilk. It contains no sugar and almost no flour, which is what separates it from the sweet, cakey cornbread served in the North. It takes five minutes to mix and twenty-five to bake, and it exists to be torn apart at the table beside greens, chili or a bowl of beans, with butter melting into the hot crumb.

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Unsweetened Southern Cast-Iron Bread

Gate: United StatesThe American South
Prep: 10 min
Cook: 25 min
Total time: 35 min
Serves: 8
Status: Easy
Nutrition / serving · estimated: Calories 330 kcal; Protein 8 g; Carbs 42 g; Fat 14 g; Fiber 3 g; Sodium 620 mg

Why this recipe works.

Preheats the fat in the skillet until it smokes, which is the single step that produces a real cornbread crust.
Keeps it unsweetened and honest to the Southern version, with a note on how to make the sweet Northern one if that is what you want.
Uses buttermilk and baking soda together for lift and a clean tang rather than a flat, dense crumb.
One bowl, no mixer, and on the table half an hour after you decide to make it.

Ingredients.

9 items

Servings

Equipment

25 cm cast-iron skillet
Mixing bowl
Whisk

Instructions.

Preheat the oven and skillet
Put the empty cast-iron skillet on the middle shelf and heat the oven to 220°C. Leave the pan in there for at least 10 minutes after the oven reaches temperature so the iron is thoroughly heated through, not just warm.
Mix the dry ingredients
Whisk the cornmeal, flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda and salt together in a large bowl until evenly combined with no pockets of white powder. Break up any lumps of cornmeal with your fingers.
Combine the wet ingredients
Beat the eggs into the buttermilk in a jug until smooth and pale, then whisk in the 40 g of melted, cooled butter. If the butter is still hot it will set into small solid flecks in the cold buttermilk.
Bring the batter together
Pour the wet mixture into the dry and stir just until no dry streaks remain — about fifteen strokes. The batter should be thick but pourable, like a loose pancake batter, and slightly lumpy is correct. Do not beat it smooth.
Butter the hot pan
Pull the skillet out with an oven glove, drop in the 60 g of butter, and swirl it up the sides as it melts. It should foam hard and start to smell nutty within seconds; if it does not sizzle immediately, the pan is not hot enough.
Pour and bake
Pour the batter into the center of the pan in one go — it should hiss loudly and the edges should set on contact. Do not spread it out. Bake for 22 to 25 minutes, until the top is golden brown, the edges have pulled away from the iron, and a skewer comes out clean.
Tip The loud hiss when the batter lands is the sound of the crust forming. Silence means the skillet needed longer.
Turn out and serve hot
Let the cornbread sit in the pan for 5 minutes, then run a knife around the edge and invert it onto a board to protect the crust from steaming soft. Cut into wedges and serve hot with plenty of salted butter.

Tips from our kitchen.

Get the skillet properly hot — preheat it in the oven for a full 10 minutes and add the butter only in the last minute so it browns rather than burns.
Use medium or coarse stone-ground cornmeal if you can. Fine industrial meal makes a smoother, less interesting crumb with none of the corn texture.
Mix the batter only until the dry streaks disappear. Cornbread has little gluten to develop, but overmixing still knocks the air out and makes it heavy.
Get the batter into the hot pan within a minute of mixing. Baking soda and buttermilk start reacting immediately and the lift fades if the bowl sits around.
If you have no buttermilk, stir 1 tablespoon of white vinegar into 400 ml of whole milk and let it stand for 10 minutes until it thickens and curdles slightly.
Serve it hot from the pan. Cornbread is at its best in the first twenty minutes and goes noticeably drier by the next day.

Substitutions.

Buttermilk → Whole milk soured with 1 tbsp vinegar or lemon juice, or thinned plain yogurt: The acid is not optional — it reacts with the baking soda for lift and gives the crumb its tang. Plain milk alone will bake flat and bland.
Butter in the skillet → Bacon drippings: The older and more traditional fat, and it gives the crust a savory, smoky edge. Keep a jar in the fridge if you cook bacon regularly.
Cast-iron skillet → A heavy metal cake tin or oven-safe frying pan, preheated the same way: It works, but the crust will be thinner. Do not use glass or ceramic — they heat too slowly to fry the batter on contact.

Variations.

Northern sweet cornbread: Add 60 g sugar and swap a third of the cornmeal for plain flour. Softer, cakier and sweeter, baked in a square tin — a different tradition rather than a corruption of this one.
Jalapeno and cheddar cornbread: Fold in 100 g grated sharp cheddar and two finely chopped jalapenos before baking. A Texas and Southwest staple, especially alongside chili.
Cracklin cornbread: Stir crisp pork cracklings through the batter so they stud the crumb with salty crunch. An old Southern way of using up what was left from rendering lard.

Storage & reheating.

Cornbread is best the day it is baked and starts drying by the next morning. Keep leftovers wrapped at room temperature for 2 days and revive slices in a dry skillet with a little butter until the cut faces crisp. It freezes for 2 months, wrapped tightly in slices, and reheats from frozen in a 180°C oven in about 12 minutes. Day-old cornbread is also the correct raw material for cornbread dressing and for crumbling into a glass of cold buttermilk, which is a real Southern habit.

Serve with

Collard greens, a bowl of chili or pinto beans, and salted butter or honey butter at the table.

The story behind Skillet Cornbread.

Cornbread is the oldest continuously eaten bread in the American South, and it starts with Indigenous corn. Native peoples across the Southeast ground corn and cooked it as ash cakes and pones long before European settlement, and colonists adopted the grain because wheat grew poorly in the Southern climate and cost money to import. Cornmeal did not need yeast, did not need long proving, and could be turned into bread in a pan over a fire within half an hour — which made it the daily bread of poor households, Black and white, for generations.

The sugar question is the sharpest dividing line in American baking. Traditional Southern cornbread has no sugar at all: it is a savory bread meant to be eaten with salty, fatty, greens-heavy food, and adding sugar makes it a cake in the eyes of people who grew up on it. Northern cornbread, which is sweeter, softer, higher in wheat flour and often baked in a square pan, is a genuinely different and perfectly good product with the same name. Some of this divide tracks the type of corn historically milled in each region, and some of it is simply taste hardening into identity. Either way, a Southern cook offered sweet cornbread will usually say something about it.

The skillet matters as much as the batter. A cast-iron pan is preheated in the oven with fat in it — bacon drippings traditionally, butter more often now — until it is genuinely smoking, and the batter goes in cold. The temperature shock sets and fries the bottom and sides on contact, producing a crust that a cold pan or a glass dish simply cannot make. The same pan, well seasoned, gets handed down in families, and there is a reasonable argument that decades of cornbread are part of why it works so well.

Questions, answered.

Should cornbread have sugar in it?

It depends entirely on where you are. Traditional Southern cornbread has none — it is a savory bread eaten with salty food, and sugar in it is considered a Northern habit. Northern cornbread is sweeter, cakier and made with more wheat flour. Both are real traditions with long histories, but they should not be confused with each other.

Why is preheating the skillet so important?

Cold batter hitting a smoking-hot buttered pan sets and fries the outside instantly, which is what creates the crunchy golden crust that defines skillet cornbread. In a cold pan the batter warms slowly with the oven and simply bakes through, giving you a pale, soft-sided bread that tastes fine but has no crust at all.

Can I use polenta instead of cornmeal?

Coarse polenta will work but produces a noticeably grittier, more crumbly bread, because it is ground from untreated corn and is usually coarser than cornmeal. If polenta is all you have, grind it briefly in a food processor and let the batter sit for five minutes so the grains hydrate before it goes in the pan.

Why did my cornbread come out dry and crumbly?

Cornbread has no gluten network to hold moisture, so it dries fast if overbaked. Pull it as soon as a skewer comes out clean and the top springs back, usually 22 to 25 minutes. Adding too much cornmeal by scooping rather than weighing is the other common cause, since a packed cup can hold 20 percent more than intended.

Do I need a cast-iron skillet?

It is the traditional and best pan because it holds enough heat to fry the batter on contact, but any heavy metal oven-safe pan preheated the same way will get you most of the way there. Avoid glass and ceramic dishes — they heat too gradually, so the batter warms up with the pan and never develops a crust.

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