Southern Spoon Bread Recipe

Hi I’m Betty. Welcome to Betty’s Kitchen. Tonight we’re going to be making Southern Spoon Bread. And if you are not familiar the south, you may not really know what spoon bread is so I’m going show you and also I’m going to show you how to make it.

Around my part of the country, Spoon Bread is something that pretty much everybody knows about that and it’s very highly desired and even revered. There is a town about ten miles south of where I lived called Berea, Kentucky which is the home to Berea College, also the home to a historic hotel which is called Boone Tavern.

And every night at Boone Tavern at dinner is served spoon bread. And that’s probably the most famous on the menu, and there have been write-ups about that particular hotel and that restaurant and also there is a Spoon Bread Festival every year so it’s quite a thing around here.

Now making spoon bread is sort of an art. It’s not that easy to do. I have tried this course at recipes over the years just getting my recipe right. I do have Boone Tavern’s recipe so if anybody’s interested in that, you have to make a comment and let me know and I can post that with my recipe and you can try that out.

The reason I have used Moon Tavern recipe is that it requires using a mixture to beat the mixture for 15 minutes. And now I have a kind of, so time so I go with a different sort of recipe. It tastes just as good. I think maybe even little better so this is what we are going to do with tonight.

We start with two cups of milk. Now I had already poured in here and we turn this back on. I had on earlier; you need to grain this up just to a boil. And while that’s happening, I’m going to work with my corn meal. Here I have yellow cornmeal, we have three quarters of cup and I have one quarter of a cup white cornmeal mix. I did not have the container that comes and you can see I have use most importantly love it.

Then I’m going to just put these two of three quarters of the cup of yellow cornmeal and then a 1/4 of a cup of white cornmeal mix. And this is self processing cornmeal mix but the other is not self processing. So I need to add some salt, this is one teaspoons salt and some baking powder; this is one half teaspoon of baking powder. So I’m just going to stir this around that’s why I got this larger measuring cup out just so I could have a chance to stir this around.

And on watches over here is getting hot, I will turn it off for a moment. And here to have a slow mix together, and then I will add it, and cook that until it makes a medium big mush. So this is almost ready to go in and this is nice and hot so I’m going to pour in.

And again, get to before it clumps and clumps, stir it and then just keep string, stir it continuously while this cook going to bubble up in a minute and I’ll cook it probably about three to five minutes until it gets that medium quick pick mush so probably I want to go away for a bit then come back and show you the result.

This will add a medium to dip mush. You see what it looks like, that’s cornmeal mush and it happens to have the proportions that I gave you, it does not have to be exactly like that. If you prefer to have it all yellow cornmeal or white cornmeal or white cornmeal mix is not going to make a whole lot of difference but with my experimentation, this is worth dish for me. Let me move some of these things away and then we’ll continue with our recipe. So I'm going to mix this with all of those things.

And we have our nice cornmeal mush. And that was the goal of getting to this point. Once we get to this point, we’re going to add in some melted butter or margarine. This is one half cup of melted butter. I’m sorry do not before. One half stick is this much, that’s the other half. It’s melted butter, one half stick which would be ¼ cup. Let just add that in there and you do not have to worry about the heat is already cold, it’s not like you’re going to cook some eggs about corn onion and on egg mixture that started around anyway. And get ready this.

Next thing we have coming up will be eggs and we have two well beaten eggs. Ladies and gentlemen, they do not have to be like can be smaller eggs is not that particular but you get ten minutes certainly. So just focus in stir, so that they get incorporated completely in your mixture. Stir this really well.

And the next thing that’s going to happen is we’re going to transfer this to a mixing bowl and then we’re going to use an electric mixer to beat this until it’s very fine. And as I mentioned earlier, Boone Tavern’s recipe does have a mixing going on for 15 minutes. So you can count on me getting this maybe three to five minutes.

So I will just put it in our larger bowl. Well I missed, I did not bring out of bubble a bit form but I’ll put it in larger bowl and then I will show you what it looks like after ten beaten for about five minutes. I’ll be right back.

And there’s coming five minutes of beating. And I decided to go with five minutes to show the best that is probably going to look. It might get a little bit better if I will on to the 15 but I do not think so. If it were just my husband and me, I probably just beat it for three minutes or— you found this in a real rush, just beat it for one minute and it will be okay. It is better if you will beat it longer because it gets that area into that has a really nice texture. You want to sure it looks like this when it goes to your baking dish.

So I have baking dish that I spray with Canola oil. You can use butter or margarine. Some kind of little spray that you need to have some dish that you can spoon that into because this is spoon bread and they will be spooned out when we serve it.

So let me pour this end and we’re getting it in the oven. I do have my oven preheated to 400 degrees. This cooks that are pretty hot in pretty hot oven but it does not cool all that long, maybe 20 minutes or so. You can tell when it is done. So I’ll keep watch on the time and tell how long I have cooked it but I’m expecting it will be around 15-20 minutes. You can tell from the top because it’ll be nice and brown, and it will be puffy as well.

I’m going to smooth that up because it do not mark the top of the certain to rise up really high compared to the rest of it. So we’ll start with this smooth look there. I’ll be put it in the oven and in about 20 minutes, I’ll be back with you to serve it.

And then exactly 20 minutes and I’ll be watching this looks like have that, and lightly brown on the top, and that’s what you want. You want to make sure that it is done so you can just quickly stick with toothpick in the center, it should come out clean just like for our cake. We talked about spoon bread, we talked about real bred is done all the way through. Better to serve with the spoon is not runny bread. So we should be that test. Make sure that it is done.

Now as far serving it, I have a little bowl in here and typically this is not going to be your main bread for the meal. This will be served like it’s sort of as an appetizer. At Boone Tavern, it served along with some relishes. So the waiter or waitress comes along and has a big butter spoon breads, and just spoons up a portion and puts on your plate or on a little side dish. It’s kind of that on edge that cut through and that was it looks like.

And as always, we got one with butter so got the butter on there, and it’s topping hot but this got the best time to take a bite when it’s really hot and got the butter melting with it. This is one of our Southern Spoon bread. I hope you enjoy it and thanks for trying to learn something about my culture.