How To Make Jiffy Cornbread Better With Some Tang

Jiffy may not be a name that's entirely synonymous with cornbread. Even discounting any Mandela effect confusion which might have you believing that Jiffy peanut butter was a thing (it wasn't; the brand has been Jif since 1958), the company also produces a flagship product called Jiffy baking mix that makes the best coffee cake. Still, the cornbread-slash-corn muffin mix is certainly one of the company's star products, as it's been the salvation of anyone who doesn't feel like the bother of making cornbread (or muffins) from scratch. (For you overachievers, here's a recipe for salty honey butter corn muffins.) While everyone likes to put their spin on it (including a firefighter who adds yellow cake mix), the best Jiffy mix cornbread includes a tangy element like sour cream.

To add sour cream to Jiffy cornbread batter, combine half a cup with a stick of melted butter and two beaten eggs. Once you've achieved a reasonably homogeneous goo, stir in the boxed mix. If you want cornbread that's both sweet and tangy, you could also add a few tablespoons of sugar or honey to the batter. Then pour the batter into a pan and bake it as it says on the box. There, you've significantly upgraded your cornbread with about 10 seconds of extra effort and less than a buck's worth of sour cream.

You needn't stick with sour cream to add tang to your cornbread, since an equal amount of plain Greek yogurt would also work. Heck, you could even experiment with flavored yogurt for a sweeter (and possibly somewhat fruity-tasting) cornbread. Mayonnaise is another option, and, again, you'd add half a cup per box.

To tinker with the basic recipe as little as possible and still get some tangy flavor, though, you can also use buttermilk in place of plain milk. The back-of-the-box recipe calls for nothing more than the mix itself, plus one egg and ⅓ cup milk, and this last ingredient can be swapped out on a 1:1 basis for buttermilk. If you're not a big buttermilk drinker (who is this century?), powdered buttermilk will work just fine. You can also just add a teaspoon of distilled vinegar or lemon juice to a ⅓ cup measure and fill it up with milk for a DIY quick fix that can bring the tang on an as-needed basis.