Tuesdays with Dorie: Savory Corn and Pepper Muffins

Rebecca of Ezra Pound Cake chose this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe: Savory Corn and Pepper Muffins. This is quite a change from some of the rich and sweet things that we’ve made recently. This is the first Tuesdays with Dorie recipe that tested my knife skills. That’s ok though, I have pretty good knife skills. (I worked in a deli for about a year and I had lots and lots of practice!)

These are a corn muffin with added cilantro, jalapeno and red pepper. The recipe also called for corn kernels, but I decided to leave it out since I didn’t want to buy corn just to use a couple of tablespoons. In the end I didn’t think that they were necessary. I almost omitted the jalapeno, since I didn’t want these to be too spicy, but they were ok in the end.

I like really sweet cornbread, but this isn’t very sweet. That was ok because there were all the extra flavors of the red pepper, cilantro, and jalapeno. I liked the chili powder as well. There actually would have been great for the holidays, with all the red and green bits added in. Dorie does give a variation with more sugar and all of the extra bits and seasonings left out, which I might try one of these days.

I used a fairly coarse cornmeal, which I think I would have preferred something ground a little finer. They weren’t really dry, but they were kind of crunchy from the cornmeal, which was a little strange. These paired well with chili, which seems to be the dish that many Tuesdays with Dorie bloggers decided to make to accompany these muffins.

Recipe from Baking from my Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan, page 6