Cornbread is a favorite in our house, so I have been on a quest to find the best low-fat cornbread. After some experimentation, I have it!

I got the original recipe from a search on DinnerBeat. The cornbread was excellent, but a stick of butter was more than I wanted.

First, I tried just leaving out some of the butter altogether. Using half the butter resulted in a bread indistinguishable from the original. That cut the total fat in the bread from 100g to 56g. A huge improvement! However, it was still too high for me.

Reducing the butter even more without countering with any new additions yielded a dry bread, significantly inferior to the original.

Next I tried cutting the butter to 2T and replacing the balance of the butter with 1/4 cup applesauce. This was too sticky and heavy.

The final result? Cutting out all the butter (excluding a small amount to grease the pan) and using 1/4 cup of applesauce in place of all the butter created a whole pan of cornbread with a total fat count of 12g! A very reasonable 1.5g of fat per slice.

You can find the perfected recipe here.

Labels: Variations