Ina Garten's Simple Upgrade For The Best Cornbread You'll Ever Eat

Winter evenings call for warm meals such as a hot pot of chili filled with spices to bring on even more heat. And, of course, if you're going to indulge in a bowl of chili, you'll want to pair it with some sweet cornbread. Your favorite cornbread not only creates contrast against the beanie, savory taste of the chili, but it can also help to soften the blow of some of the heat.

If you want to really enhance this sweet side, gourmet chef Ina Garten has a tip to help you make the best cornbread. She takes a traditional cornbread recipe from celebrity Jennifer Garner, which includes simple pantry staples like cornmeal, flour, and buttermilk, and enhances it with the addition of beurre noisette, the French term for brown butter. She also finishes off the dish with flaky sea salt for the perfectly elegant garnish and a pinch of added flavor.

The first ingredient Ina Garten adds to her cornbread is brown butter, and there are quite a few reasons why this tastes so good. Brown butter is the product of the Maillard reaction, which causes the milk solids in regular butter to caramelize. That chemical reaction leads to nutty, toasty, caramel notes in the butter that shine through when you use it in your cornbread. It also brings out more sweet notes in the cornbread and plays up some of the sugars you'd normally use in the dish.

The sea salt Garten adds to her cornbread is another reason her dish is so delicious. For one thing, seal salt has a mineral flavor to it thanks to the fact that it doesn't go through as much refining. This adds a unique taste to it that gives the bread complexity. At the same time, the salt helps to balance out all those sweet flavors in the bread. And, since salt is a flavor enhancer, it works to boost the other tasting notes in your cornbread (and to really pull out those toasted flavors from the brown butter).

Although it might not seem like a big deal, there's one other key to how Ina Garten makes her cornbread that helps give it delicious flavors: She cooks her cornbread in a cast iron skillet. While you can bake cornbread in bread pans or other types of pans, by cooking your cornbread in a highly conductive cast iron skillet, she boosts her texture. Using a skillet to cook the bread creates crispy, crunchy edges that create a nice contrast to the soft, buttery center. 

Another reason to use a skillet is also to take advantage of how you prepped your brown butter. Although the idea is, of course, to scrape the brown butter out of your skillet and into your bread batter, some of it will linger and stick to the pan regardless. When you cook the bread in that same skillet, you can enhance those caramel notes, particularly around the crunchy edges, and really bring out the flavor of the beurre noisette. Next time you set out to make a batch of cornbread, give Garten's quick tips a whirl and you might just find your usual cast-iron cornbread tastes better than ever.