18 May 2021
Pre-heat oven to 400F. Do not pre-heat skillet.
Mix dry ingredients, then stir in milk. Pour batter into liberally-oiled iron skillet. Bake twenty minutes, turn over like a pancake, bake ten more minutes.
You can turn off the oven at any time after turning the bread over.
I not only couldn't find corn flour, I couldn't find any meal finer than "medium grind", which makes good porridge but very gritty bread. So I thought I'd try soaking it in milk overnight to make it softer. It turned out to be several days before I could make it up, and the meal had soaked up most of the milk, so that I got dough instead of batter, and had to pat it out like a hamburger.
It turned out to be excellent, and it's *much* easier to flip over when it doesn't fill the entire skillet.
bake fifteen minutes, turn, turn off oven (skillet is hot enough to brown top).
I wanted to use up some heavily-seasoned buttermilk left over from frying fish, so I mixed half a cup of Quaker corn meal, half a cup of whole wheat flour, and three-eighths teaspoon of baking soda in a bowl, then dumped it into the seasoned buttermilk. This stirred up to a soft dough, so I poured in a little milk and got a very thick batter. Then I added a little as-sold buttermilk and got a batter thin enough to spread itself out, but not all the way to the edge of the skillet.
Fifteen minutes followed by ten proved sufficient, but with all the paprika in the buttermilk, it was hard to tell whether the bread had browned.
The bread tasted a bit as though I'd soaked perch filets in the buttermilk for twenty-four hours. Unlike the hush puppies, it wasn't excessively seasoned.
I wish now that I'd stirred half a cup of corn meal into the buttermilk as soon as I decided to make corn bread out of it.
2 December 2017
A few days ahead of time, I put the dry ingredients into a one-gallon bag (I forgot the fructose and added it later.), twisted the neck to drive out air, secured it with a twist-tie, and stashed it in the fridge. Perhaps the freezer would have been better.
The day before the party, I dumped the contents of the bag into my big steel mixing bowl, stirred them together, added an egg and two serving spoons of corn oil, beat the liquids until they became lumps of dough, then used my pastry blender to cut up the lumps until they went away.
Stir in two cups of milk, drop well-separated spoonfuls onto a generously-oiled cookie sheet.
Every five minutes, remove the cookie sheet on the top rack and immediately turn all the biscuits over. Then move the sheet on the botom rack to the top rack and put the newly-filled sheet on the bottom rack. When you take out the next-to-the-last sheet, turn off the oven.
While waiting for the cookie sheet to cool, move the upside-down biscuits to a sheet of waxed paper on the counter. When they are cold, bag and freeze. Leave out some for immediate use.
Mix dry ingredients in a twelve-quart bowl, then stir in the water with a spoon that has a short, strong handle. Knead with the back of the spoon until all flour is incorporated. Makes one large loaf or one pizza and one small loaf.
Mix dry ingredients in a twelve-quart bowl, then stir in the water with a spoon that has a short, strong handle. Knead with the back of the spoon until all flour is incorporated. Cover bowl with pizza pan, allow to rise during nap.
Generously oil three cookie sheets.
Knead dough with well-oiled hands until it forms a ball; roll between hands, then break off one third of the dough, put it into one of the cookie sheets, set aside.
Continue oiling hands by rubbing them on the cookie sheets.
Break the remaining dough in half, put one piece into each remaining cookie sheet. Break each lump into halves, then into thirds, rolling into spheres after each operation. When you have a dozen spheres, roll each one again, then flatten it against the cookie sheet with your hands, working in rotation to give the dough time to relax. Blot up the oil in the pans whenever you feel it will help.
When the buns are as flat as you can manage with hands, rub a wooden brayer (aka "pizza roller") in the oil in the two pans, then roll each bun flat and wide, again working all at the same time to let the dough relax a bit.
The buns should be greasy enough not to glue themselves to plastic wrap. Cover and set aside to rise.
Treat the remaining dough the same way, then sprinkle it with poppy seeds, sesame seeds, onion flakes, or whatever you have that goes with bread and will serve to distinguish this tray from the other two. Cover and set aside to rise.
After about an hour, pre-heat the oven to 425 -- check the locations of the shelves first! -- and put in the two first sheets. After five minutes, reduce heat to 400. After ten minutes more, start checking to see whether they are brown on the bottom. If the lower sheet browns first, put the third sheet in, then move it to the top shelf when you take the other sheet out.
Turn the buns bottom up as soon as they come out of the oven. You can probably get the first dozen all on one sheet, to save counter space.
When the buns are thoroughly cold, put a few of the remaining buns into one or two sandwich bags for immediate use and freeze the rest in one large bag. One can sometimes find gallon-size bags that can be twist-tied to reduce the amount of air trapped in the bag.