Smoked Bacon & Onion Sweet Cornbread

This cornbread is done in true southern style. I’ll take it even further and say Texas Style! You cook the cornbread in the same cast iron skillet that you cooked the bacon, leaving the bacon grease in the skillet. Then you cook it and serve it in the same cast iron skillet. What a delicious crust this makes!

Of course, you can cook this in the oven, but I decided to add an extra flavor to it by cooking it in the smoker. Oh man, let me tell you, this will knock your socks off! You’ll be looking for seconds, that’s for sure!

Smoked Bacon & Onion Sweet Cornbread

Ingredients

2 cups yellow cornmeal
4 Tablespoons flour
1 – 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup white sugar
3 green onions (chopped fine)
4 pieces of thick cut bacon
1 – 1/2 cups milk (skim milk is fine)
2 eggs (beaten)
2 Tablespoons bacon grease

Preparation

1) In a large mixing bowl, combine the cornmeal, flour, baking soda, salt and sugar. Sift together until thoroughly mixed.

2) In a 12 inch cast iron skillet, fry up your 4 strips of thick cut bacon. Chop them up into small pieces and put them into separate mixing bowl.

3) Chop the green onions and add them to the mixing bowl with the bacon. Now add in the milk, eggs and 2 tablespoons of the bacon grease.

4) Now pour the wet ingredients into the larger mixing bowl with the dry ingredients and thoroughly mix these together. Set the batter aside.

5) Get your smoker going. You’ll want to get this hotter than you usually do. We’ll need it up to about 375. Put your cast iron skillet in right away, so it’s good and hot when you pour the batter in. I used apple wood for this cornbread, but you can use what ever wood you prefer.

Note: Remove the water pan to allow more heat. I also had to open the side door on my Webber Smoky Mountain vertical smoker a couple of times to get it hot enough. It would start dropping back down towards 350, then I would open the door again for about 1 minute to get it moving back up.

6) Once it’s up to temperature, pour the batter into the skillet, close it up, and maintain this temperature as best as possible. (If you have an electric smoker, this shouldn’t be any problem!)

7) This should take about a half hour to cook. Stick a toothpick into the center of the cornbread. If it comes out clean, it’s done. Another indicator of it being done is that the sides should start pulling away from the pan.

Take it off and serve it up in the skillet. It will stay nice and warm sitting in the skillet!

Here’s what it looked like just before I took it out of the smoker! Man, ain’t that pretty!?