Gluten-free Baking: Cornbread

First, a bit of a rant about gluten-free recipe books. Phil bought me a couple, and I am highly underwhelmed.

• Seem to focus almost entirely on making ersatz versions of things rather than on embracing things that naturally don't have wheat or gluten
• Call for all sorts of things you're not likely to have in the house - one asked for four different kinds of flour for a simple cornbread recipe
• Want you to make up magic baking mixes, which is fine if you're baking all the time, but if you're not, it's difficult if not impossible to figure out how much of ingredient X to put into just the thing you are making

But I was determined to make gluten-free cornbread this morning. So off to the Internet. I found a couple of interesting recipes to build from, and settled on this. I will have to check out more of the celiac.com site when I have a chance.

Recipe:

Gluten-Free Cornbread
Makes 1 8" x 8" pan
(Ingredients reflect what I used)

1 c Buttermilk
1 egg
1/4 c butter plus enough to grease pan
2T maple syrup

1 c cornmeal
1 c white rice flour
2 T san on tou (or light brown sugar or more maple syrup)
2 t baking powder
1 t baking soda
1/2 t xanthan gum
1/4 t salt

Grease an 8" square baking pan. Preheat oven to 400F.

Melt the butter. In a blender, process the egg and melted butter and slowly add the buttermilk and syrup. Blend until smooth.In a large mixing bowl, thoroughly mix all dry ingredients. Add the liquid ingredients, mixing gently but thoroughly with a large spoon. It will come together differently than with wheat flour. Turn out into the pan (the original recipe said "pour" but my my batter was stiff enough that I had to spoon it into the pan). The picture above shows the batter poured into the pan.

Bake 30 minutes. Turn out onto a rack to cool. Serve with butter or jam.

Eating notes:

I was very surprised when the cornbread turned so nicely out of the pan (see picture at the top of the post. Cornbread just doesn't do that, in my experience, unless you cook it in a hot, buttered iron skillet. The cornbread is definitely dryer than a wheat version, but not unpleasantly so, and a little butter took care of that right away. We really liked the crispy crust. The other good thing was that although this was made in a conventional oven and I did not use convection, it cooked very evenly. The center and edges, including the corners, were very uniform. So, all in all, a success that will go into my breakfast rotation.

Update: We each ate 1/8 of the cornbread at breakfast. I was gone for lunch and dinner and Phil ate 1/4 more. He felt out of sorts and overloaded until he had a bit of stew - it was just more carbs than he can handle in one day any more. Honestly, I'm surprised he didn't have to stop before he did. We have frozen the rest for later.