BBA Challenge Corn Bread

With every bread in Peter Reinhart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice, I learn more about baking.  Today we made the corn bread.  Mr. Reinhart's corn bread is more of a moist, flavorful hearty dish than just a dry, crumbly cornbread as so many of them are.  The ingredient list includes buttermilk, honey, brown sugar, bacon and corn kernels, as well as the expected ingredients.  The coarse-grind cornmeal is soaked in buttermilk overnight before the rest of the ingredients are added.  This recipe suggests the bacon be baked in the oven before being crumbled to add into the dough.  That was a neat, easy way to prepare the bacon. My only problem with this recipe was that I used the frozen corn option since fresh corn isn't available here right now.  The recipe didn't mention thawing the corn before adding it so I didn't.  Of course, frozen corn in the batter increased the baking time quite a bit.  I had to leave the bread in the oven about 20 minutes longer than the recipe called for to reach the required internal temperature.  That didn't seem to hurt it any.  It is delicious.

This corn bread has that combination of sweet bites of fresh corn with smoky bacon pieces that go so well together anytime.  It is rich and moist.  As I was eating it, all I could think about was that I wanted a bowl of steaming  brown beans and hot cooked fresh-tasting juicy apples on the side.   If it weren't so late at night, I'd go back out to the kitchen and make both right now. . . .Mmmmmmm.