 Hey y'all, I'm Tammy. The cameraman is Chris, my husband, and this is Collard Valley Cooks. We are making our crunchy cornbread today. If you wanna know how we ate cornbread up in Northwest Georgia, well, this is how we did it. Get ready to make some good old cornbread. Now, what Lily Cornmeal is a mix. Now, we grew up just calling it Cornmeal because that's all we bought. And it has a little flour in it, self-rising already. So that helps it rise. You're gonna start out with some melted butter in the bottom. It's six tablespoons. And then you're gonna add two cups of your cornmeal mix, one egg, quarter cup of oil, and sugars. Optional, Chris likes it in there. You want some in there, Chris? No, it's okay. And then this is a cup and a half of whole buttermilk. Now, some of y'all can't get whole buttermilk. And I've told people before, you can use sour cream in your biscuits. You could probably use it in your cornbread too if you can't get the good old buttermilk because it makes a big difference in how it tastes. It is delicious with buttermilk. So you're just gonna mix this up good. I'm mixing it up with a fork so I can get that egg beat in there good. That's about how I like it to look. And we're gonna get this in my skillet. Now, your oven needs to be on 425 degrees when you start your cornbread. If you just trust me on this way to make your crunchy cornbread, you're gonna be excited. So you're gonna start your oven at 425 degrees. And you're gonna take some good old shortening in your hand and you're going to grease an iron skillet. Cornbread don't taste the same if you put it in anything other than an iron skillet. It really don't. And it don't have the crust you're gonna want it to have. You don't have to heat your skillet up on the stove or in the oven to get a crunchy cornbread. My mama didn't do this, but Chris did it and it works good. What we do is we sprinkle it with some of the cornmeal mix before we add our mixed up cornbread. Then you're gonna add your cornbread. Now we're gonna slide this in the oven. All right, y'all. Now, we grew up eating savory cornbread. Mama never put sugar in her cornbread and we didn't use the yellow cornmeal with the real sweet cornbread taste. Now, if you go out to eat down here in Savannah or around here, most restaurants serve you that kind of cornbread. But that is not what we grew up eating. We grew up eating a very savory cornbread with the ingredients I've just shown you, all right? And you let us know what you grew up eating today, all right? And tell us what part of the country you're from so that we'll know. But down here in Georgia, we make so much cornbread that cornmeal mix is readily available instead of just cornmeal. Some of y'all can't get the cornmeal mix, but here that's what we grew up calling cornmeal because we didn't know any different. All right, we're gonna get this in the oven and we're gonna bake it until it's nice and crunchy at 25 degrees. Cornbread is good and brown. Now, the longer you cook it, the browner it gets and you're gonna flip it out as soon as it comes out of the oven. You should just be able to take a paper towel and wipe out the skillet. So good job. Wiping it clean. And because it had that shortening in there, you can just wipe it out into the trash and have a nice clean skillet that's good and seasoned. Isn't that pretty? Yeah, I'm gonna show you how crunchy the cornbread is. So let me show you that it's crunchy. It's super crunchy, y'all. So you don't have to heat your skillet up in the oven to get it good and crunchy. I promise. Nice and hot and boys, it delicious. This is good, oh, southern cornbread. The way we were raised to eat it here in Northwest Georgia. And it smells so good to me. Now you can let it cool down a little bit and have it with some cornbread and milk. You could put some butter in it and just have a piece of butter or have it with a bowl of beans. Whatever your favorite way to eat it is, it'll be good. Now, our cornbread is also a lot more crumbly than the cornbread that you get, like the Jiffy cornbread that's real yellow. It's more cake-like. Our cornbread is more crumbly and that's how it's supposed to be. So if you've never made this before and we get a lot of questions, why is it so crumbly? Because it's cornbread and it's made with cornmeal, which is crumbly. We love our cornbread down here in the south. And I think you will too if you give it a try. So y'all come back and see us and find out what else we could, like our mama said. We'll see you next time. Love ya. Bye.