Sprouts Farmers Market Shoppers Can't Get Enough Of This Southern-Style Bakery Treat

We've given a lot of attention to amping up cornbread at home, from baking the best boxed cornbread with buttermilk to upgrading your cornbread with a cast iron skillet. Even more convenient than baking cornbread from a mix — and potentially equally delicious — is the prospect of buying a pan from the store. Somebody else does all the work, and you reap the benefits, namely a slightly sweet, delightfully textured, irresistibly fluffy cornbread that's somewhere between a bread and a dessert. Done right, it's ideal for eating alongside your favorite Southern dishes or crumbling in a casserole of old-school oyster dressing at the holidays. Going by reviews, Sprouts Farmers Market, one of our favorite bougie-feeling grocery stores, really delivers with its bakery cornbread. 

With an average rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars and dozens of satisfied reviews, we feel pretty confident that this is an exceptional offering. But don't take our word for it — listen to the people who bought it and wrote a review on the item's product page. "Sweet corn bread like I remember as a child growing up in the South. I have to control myself or I will eat half the pan the first day," one happy buyer raved. Another customer praised the convenience factor: "Perfect for when I don't feel like making it at home. Nicely sweet, even better with butter!" Harkening back to our suggestion about oyster dressing, another intrepid reviewer used the cornbread to make their holidays special. "I purchased Sprouts cornbread for use in my Thanksgiving stuffing," they wrote. "It turned out great. There were a couple of pieces left over for us to enjoy. Thanks Sprouts!"

As per Sprouts' own description, this cornbread is made with cornmeal sourced right in the American Midwest. Moreover, almost all the ingredients, minus a few minor ones at the end, are products that you can easily pronounce ... and which probably feature prominently in your own cornbread recipe, like flour, sugar, eggs, milk, and sea salt. It's possible that the reason customers gush about homemade taste is because Sprouts keeps its cornbread pretty darn close to the stuff folks concoct in their own kitchens. Oftentimes, commercial bakery products are chockablock full of fillers and preservatives that might alter the taste or texture. While mono- and diglycerides, xanthan gum, and enzymes are admittedly listed in this cornbread's ingredients, they are way at the end of the list, where they arguably belong. The price is great, too — just $5.99 for a generous one-pound pan, as of this writing.

No cornbread bought at a store is likely to hold a candle to what your Meemaw made in her kitchen, but, if customers are to be believed, the variety at Sprouts is a pretty darn close substitute. It features lots of real ingredients and tastes like it was made with care. We'll be picking up a pan next time we make some homemade baked beans or hoppin' john, because saving time on baking and still having something delicious is a compromise that sounds awfully appealing to our ears!