Hi, I’m Betty. Welcome to Betty’s Kitchen. We’re going to make Very Southern Corn Sticks today.

I’m all going to start it out with self-rising flour, it doesn’t matter what brand you use. If you are interested in adding additives, then you can use all purpose but then that requires having a few additional ingredients and I like to skip those and make it easy if possible. So, I have one half cup of self rising flour that goes in a medium to large mixing bowl.

Now, next to this, I did not have the container that I originally bought it in, but this is self-rising corn meal mix. It’s not just corn meal. It’s self rising corn meal mix that means it has some flour in it also. But I’m using one cup of the self-rising corn meal mix. My proportion is always one to two, one part flour to two parts corn meal mix. So I’m going to put that in. And then with that, I’m going to put one egg. You can see I’ve got some jumbo eggs here, they don’t have to be jumbo, just one egg will do. Let me try to clean up a little bit of this by placing them away from my workspace and then we’ll add that egg into our mixture. There’s the egg. It’s nice and let’s get rid of that.

And at this point, if I start stirring, then it’s going to lump. So what I need to do is add my milk and I’m using skimmed milk. What I have done is to pour two cups right here. I don’t know exactly how much I’m going to be using of that but I can tell you when it’s ready. So I’m just going to add and stir and then maybe add some more depending on what I need.

The oil over here is for baking these in the oven so I’ll have an oiled corn stick pan that I put this in. But let’s just try putting some of this milk and I’ll tell you how much I have used when I’m finished. That’s almost half of it and start stirring, you don’t have to beat that egg first, it will combine appropriately with the other ingredients. And I can say I’m going to need a little more milk. I don’t want to get this all lumpy. So I’ll just pour more milk when it seems to be needed and continue to stir.

You don’t want to over stir this. It doesn’t have the proper consistency if you beat it with a mixture. It needs to be hand stirred but not overly, so basically until the lumps are gone. This is looking pretty good but I’ve usually have mine a little thinner than this. This would be fine but let me check on this. It looks like I have used about one cup of the milk, so I think I’m going to use another quarter of a cup. So, if I’m going write up the recipe, I’m going to ask you to use one and one quarter cups of skim milk or any milk, home milk is fine. But it does make this a little better in terms of the consistency. And you just have to do this for many, many years and I have done it for probably 50 years, since I was a kid growing up on a farm in a rural town in Kentucky. But that’s kind a mixture you want to have.

Now let’s go over to the oven where I have my preheated corn stick pan. I used peanut oil that I’ve pointed out to you earlier to put some in each one of the corn shaped indentations of the pan. We’re going to pour the mixture in there and then we’ll bake it. This is at a very high degree but it does need to be heated before you pour this mixture in and this maybe a little messy but will just start pouring this in. So I’m going to start at the very end and pour until I think that’s full. And it will start sizzling and it may run over a little bit, don’t worry about it. You may want to share the spaces. Then I think I have one more and then maybe even a little bit if I see some missing that I might want to make it a little bit more in those spots. We could see it’s half cooked already, so what I’m going to do is push it back and then I close the oven door. It’s at 450 degrees in less than ten minutes I think this will be done, I’ll be back to show the results.

Now, our corn sticks have been cooking about seven minutes and I’ve been watching them very closely. I noticed that they were getting nice and brown on the bottom just by looking. I take a fork and lift them. I just could tell they’re getting brown in the bottom so I decided to put the broiler on, just turn this not to broil, and I turn this heat up a little bit to brown at the top. So you don’t want it just brown on the bottom and part on the tops so it will come out looking like this.

So I’m going to bring this out and put it on the pad to protect the counter. Close the oven door and then I’ll just pop this up into a plate. And they’ll want to stick together a little bit, because I’ll let that dribble, if I was really particular about that I would stop it, it doesn’t harm anything. It’s just a little crusty look there. I want you to see the bottom in particular, isn’t that beautiful?

And here our couple more and that makes seven that came out of that pan. Now I have a lot of butter still left so I could just keep going and making more corn sticks. What I could’ve done instead of making corn sticks I could’ve use the same procedure using an eight-inch square pan and pour the batter into a hot greased pan and baked it for maybe, let’s say 20 minutes or so and I would pick cornbread which I would cut into squares or I’ve used the muffin tin, and also it needs to be hot when you pour the batter in.

Now, these will cook, as I said, for about seven minutes. So it just depends on how thick you make them. I didn’t want to run over too much in the oven and I already have to clean the oven with that because of the door. So, let me come over here and just give you another idea of how this moved down. If you’re a country girl like me, there’s probably nothing you’ll like better than a corn stick dripping with butter. Delicious!