Pink Cornbread
Years ago when we farmed at a sleepaway farm camp for kids, pink cornbread was a staple… The kids just adored the pinkish color, and it was a fun way to sneak beets onto the plates of the most selective eating kids. And the beet adds a nice natural sweetness instead of all the sugar that is usually added to cornbread. Though if you really love sweet cornbread, go ahead and add a TBSP or 2 of maple syrup to this recipe.
medium beet, peeled, cut into 1-inch cubes
2 cups finely ground Painted Mountain corn
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
2 cups milk (or buttermilk, yogurt, almond milk, whatever)
4 TBSP butter
2 eggs
Boil the beet chunks until they are soft, then drain. Put them in a bowl, and put the butter on top of them, letting the hot beets melt the butter. Let them cool off a bit. Meanwhile, grind your corn! Remove the kernels of corn from the cob into a bowl. (We do this just by hand, pushing off rows of kernels with our thumbs.) Then use a (clean!) coffee grinder, blender, or food processor to grind up the corn in small batches if you don’t have a corn grinder. Make sure you do just a bit at a time, and pulse the corn versus just all at once. The finer the grind, the more “bread-like” this cornbread will be. (And we have made it all different stages of coarseness, it’s delicious however much it gets ground.) If you end up grinding more than the 2 cups needed for this recipe, it stores best in the fridge or freezer. (Corn stores for years dried on the cob, but once it is ground it can go bad without cold storage. We grind what we need for each recipe, and hang the rest of the beautiful cobs along the top of our kitchen windows until they are needed.) If your ears produce less than 2 cups of ground corn, or you want a different texture to your cornbread, you can do up to half of the cornmeal as any flour you want. (For instance, you can do 1 cup of your ground Painted Mountain cornmeal and 1 cup of white flour, or 1 1/2 cups of the ground Painted Mountain corn and a half cup of commercial cornmeal… as long as you have 2 cups of flour, at least half of it being corn flour, it’s great.) Once you have 2 cups of flour, stir the salt, baking soda, and baking powder together. Add the milk and eggs to the butter and beet bowl, and either use an immersion blender to blend everything together, or vigorously fork everything together until the beet is smooth, or use a blender or food processer. Add the pureed beet mixture into the cornmeal bowl, and mix everything well. Bake in an oiled cast iron pan at 325 for about 30 minutes. Use a knife to check if it’s fully cooked inside after 30 minutes. Go for longer if needed. Enjoy!