Okara Cornbread

Tuesday, September 28th, 2010

I've been experimenting with okara because I think it's such a great ingredient to substitute carbs with and it has the added benefit of tons of protein. I first tried making this cornbread by replacing the flour or extra cup of cornmeal that most recipes call for with okara, but this ended up in a cornbread that was lacking in corn flavor so I added creamed corn and it made all the difference. I also like my cornbread a little on the sweet side so I added sugar but you can easily omit it if you like a more savory cornbread. This cornbread is a little sweet, moist enough that it doesn't crumble like traditional cornbread and best of all it's loaded in protein and you hardly notice it. It's also easily adaptable for a vegan cornbread but I love my butter so I'm sticking with butter for now.

Ingredients
1 cup yellow cornmeal
1 cup okara (should be slightly moist but not wet)
1 cup of cream corn
2 tbsp. unsalted butter or margarine if you want vegan okara cornbread
2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. kosher salt
3 tbsp. sugar
1 cup unsweetened soy milk

Directions
1) Mix dry ingredients: Cornmeal, okara, baking powder, salt and sugar.*Make sure that you break up the okara so that you don't find large chunks of it throughout the cornbread.
2) Whisk egg and add cream corn, soy milk and melted butter making sure that the melted butter isn't too hot that it will cook the egg.
3) Combine the wet and dry ingredients and mix well.
4) Grease the bottom and sides of the pan and pour contents of batter into the pan.
5) Bake at 420 F about 20-25 minutes or until the top is golden and it passes the toothpick test.

Add the dry ingredients to a bowl and mix. Break-up any large pieces of okara.