Chili Con Carne Corn Bread Pie

Chili Con Carne and Corn Bread go together like tomato and basil. So I’ve combined them to make a pie: Chili Con Carne Corn Bread Pie! This is a fabulous way to use up leftover Chili Con Carne and the corn bread batter for the pie topping takes minutes to mix up (without the use of any appliance!).

This recipe is part of a Chili Con Carne Series where I use leftover chili and transform it into other dishes. 

Earlier this week I shared my Shredded Beef Chili Con Carne recipe. It makes ALOT! About 12 to 15 cups! Which is just perfect because Chili Con Carne freezes so well and is incredibly versatile. Potato skins, as a pasta sauce, in lasagna bakes, wrapped in pastry, as a soup base, on fries and chili dogs and of course Mexican favourites like tacos, burritos, enchiladas, nachos. The list of things you can make with Chili Con Carne is so extensive that I decided to do a separate post post on it. I’ll update this post with a link to it once I share it!

One of the sides I love to make for Chili Con Carne are Corn Bread Muffins. Every time I make Corn Bread Muffins, it amazes me how incredibly delicious they are and yet the batter takes mere minutes to make. No creaming, no mixer. Just place a handful of ingredients in a bowl, mix, and you’re done.

So it was my fondness for having Corn Bread Muffins to slop up Chili Con Carne that was the catalyst for this pie. First bite and I was in heaven. Just looking at this photo makes me want to do a face plant in this pie (except that I know how steaming hot the pie is in this photo!)

“The corn bread topping for this pie only takes a few minutes to make. Just combine a handful of ingredients in a bowl, mix, then pour into the pie dish.”

I kept this very simple and just used leftover Shredded Beef Chili Con Carne as the filling and topped it with a corn bread mixture. However, you can certainly fill it out by adding vegetables. Corn in particular would go very well (frozen or fresh) for a double corn hit, as would peas. If you wanted to add some more nutrition into it, you could even stir through shredded spinach.

I made my pies in little individual serving size pie dishes. But you can definitely make this in a larger dish, you just need to adjust the baking time to make sure the corn bread cooks through.

Hope you give this a try! Love to hear what you think. 🙂

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Chili Con Carne Corn Bread Pie

Author: Nagi | RecipeTin Eats

Prep: 5 mins

Cook: 20 mins

Total: 25 mins

Pie

4.91 from 10 votes

Servings4

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These pies are filled with Chili Con Carne and topped with corn bread! The corn bread batter only takes a few minutes to make. You can make on large pie or individual pies. You can also add vegetables into the filling - corn and peas would go especially well.

Ingredients

• ▢ 4 cups Shredded Beef Chili Con Carne
• ▢ 1 tbsp fresh parsley , finely chopped (optional)

Corn Bread Topping

• ▢ 1/2 cup melted butter
• ▢ 3 eggs
• ▢ 1 cup milk
• ▢ 1/2 cup polenta / cornmeal (Note 3)
• ▢ 1 1/2 cups self raising flour (or 3 tsp baking powder plus 1 1/4 cups + 3 tbsp of plain flour)
• ▢ 1/2 cup sugar
• ▢ 1/4 tsp salt
• ▢ 1 cup of canned creamed corn

Instructions

• Preheat oven to 180C/350F.
• Place 1 cup of Shredded Beef Chili Con Carne into 4 individual pie dishes, or 1 large pie dish.
• Combine Corn Bread Topping dry ingredients in a bowl and given them a quick stir to combine.
• Add Corn Bread Topping wet ingredients and mix to combine until lump free.
• Pour corn bread mixture over filling so it is about 1.5 cm / 1/2" thick.
• Place pie in the oven and bake for 20 to 30 minutes until golden brown on top. If making one large one, it will take closer to 35 minutes. To test for doneness, insert a skewer in the middle of the corn bread and make sure it comes out clean. If there is batter on the skewer, return to oven.
• Allow to rest for 5 minutes before serving, garnished with fresh parsley.

Recipe Notes:

1. As tempting as it is to pour a lot of batter onto the filling, don't make it much thicker than 1.5 cm / 1/2" because otherwise you will need to bake it until the top is very brown before the centre of the corn bread is cooked.

Because of this, it is better to make this pie in a dish so it is flatter rather than deep. The individual pie dishes I used are rectangle in shape, 15cm x 12cm (6" x 5") and
4 cm/ 1.4" deep.

2. You will probably have some batter left over - about 1/4 to 1/3 of it. It is difficult to make the exact amount required, especially because pie dishes differ in shape and size. If you have any batter left over, spoon it into greased ramekins or muffin tin trays and bake it at the same time as the pie. A standard muffin size corn bread will take about 15 to 20 minutes to bake.

3. Polenta is not really an ingredient, it is a porridge type dish made from cornmeal. It's the Italian equivalent of mashed potatoes! But in Australia, cornmeal - fine yellow grains - is sold as "polenta", which is confusing. In most of the rest of the world, it is sold as cornmeal.

4. The nutrition takes into account that approximately 1/4 of the corn bread batter is leftover and not used for the pie.

Nutrition Information:

Serving: 387gCalories: 591cal (30%)Carbohydrates: 78.5g (26%)Protein: 22.9g (46%)Fat: 21.2g (33%)Saturated Fat: 11.2g (70%)Cholesterol: 124mg (41%)Sodium: 1185mg (52%)Potassium: 116mg (3%)Fiber: 8.3g (35%)Sugar: 20.2g (22%)Vitamin A: 1050IU (21%)Vitamin C: 4.1mg (5%)Calcium: 110mg (11%)Iron: 4.3mg (24%)

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