a corn bread and a corn muffin

gluten and dairy free

remember all the hand-milled coarse corn flour I brought back from Çamlıhemşin? 5 kilos of it? so, please bear with me till I go through it.

of course the first thing I thought about using this flour in is a cornbread. for years at the restaurant I always made one to accompany whenever we had fresh anchovies on the menu. unless it was a pilav, the famous “hamsili pilav” of the Black Sea region of Türkiye, fresh anchovies always got some corn bread as a side. most of the time it was the simplest way of shoving the butterflied fresh anchovies into a wood burning oven. so tiny and so delicate a brief 2 minutes were all that was needed to cook them. any longer would have been an insult. but then overcooking any fish should be considered a sin.

so that cornbread became immensely popular with guests, we had to start selling it in the bakery-cum-delicatessen shop of Kantin. that cornbread was an adaptation of an American recipe. it has been so many years I don’t have a recollection of whose original recipe it was, so I can’t give due credit. now after watching several women in the Black Sea region making a dense not-fluffy cornbread with just water, salt and butter, using a much coarser flour than anything I’ve used before, I asked myself why don’t I rethink the Kantin recipe of two kinds of flour ( fine corn meal and all purpose wheat), eggs, baking powder, butter and milk in this new way?

“instead of two flours, use just the coarse corn flour.

instead of butter, go for olive oil, extra virgin of course.

keep the eggs, but skip the baking powder and opt for active dry yeast for leavening. because I want it to be airier than the traditional version.

and finally prefer water over milk.”

I said to myself.

do you also do this, blabbering to yourself about recipes? I hope some of you do, or this wouldn’t mean anything good for me.

collected all the necessary ingredients, weighing them on the go hoping to have a recipe if it works. then on a whim, I decided to add some grated courgette to it. if it brings moisture to cakes, why not to this cornbread? if courgettes are for moisture then why not add some fresh herbs and spring onions for flavour? it will all balance out well I hoped. and it did.