Cornbread Testing

A few days ago, my wife and I read an article on an almost lost corn variety -- Jimmy Red. We wanted to get some and try it, so I ordered it from Geechie Boy Mill. Since shipping was static, we bought a couple other things too. Once it arrived, we wanted to try it. But not just try it -- compare it to other meal.

So yesterday, we made cornbread from four different meals. We used three new meals from Geechie: the Jimmy Red, a blue, and a guinea flint meal. We also have on hand some stone-ground white meal from Anson Mills. In retrospect I wish we'd bought some garbage grocery-store meal to work against, but we didn't and don't keep that on hand.

So we picked a recipe from Crescent Dragonwagon's excelent The Cornbread Gospels for cornsticks mixed up four batches of the dry ingredients with the four meals and then divided the liquid ingredients into the four, to mix up batters as alike as possible. And then we baked them!

They're visually distinct, that's for sure!

And pretty! This is a closeup on the Jimmy Red, that started this whole quest:

So the three of us taste-tested the four. We were taking bites, first alone and then talking about our perceptions together. And we pretty much all had the same experience. The flavors of the four were so similar that we couldn't reliably form an opinion. But the texture of the Jimmy Red and the Guinea Flint were superior to the other two. They had good tooth, and formed a rewarding, crisp skin that was a pleasure to bite through.

We ended up not genuinely sure if there were distinctions worth nothing or if maybe the textures were caused by oven position or other poorly-controlled-for variables. The good news is that they are all fresh and good. The Jimmy Red does have a distinct look with the flecks of red from the hull, but they're all attractive in their own ways.

We're going to get some grits and see if the difference is more evident there.