Savoury Polenta Bread
Although we talk about a substitute for something, it is never as simple as adding one for one in the same quantities. For example I have sometimes been asked to use cornflour or rice flour in place of wheat flour but it never really works as they do quite different things.
After a lot of testing I have worked out a basic savory recipe using polenta that works well. and that you could vary. Once you’ve got this basic recipe you can then add all sorts of other things to it.
This is a basic cornbread recipe that I have adapted to include no wheat flour at all. You can double the recipe then bake it as one batch in a small baking dish or bake this amount in muffin tins so that you can vary what you add to each one. This gives you polenta bread roughly the size of bread rolls, and the recipe makes 6 of these..
For variation try mixing in tinned corn kernels, SunBlush® tomatoes (both of these add extra moisture) cheese, chopped bacon or ham, fried onion, spring onion, Roquito® peppers or chilli, rosemary, olives, smoked paprika, cumin or caraway. The list is endless; you could make a tray of 6 and give each one a different flavour.
Make sure your dishes are at least 3cm deep and pile the mixture up to at least 4cm so that there is a good balance of crumb mixture to crust when they are baked. Eaten hot with butter they made me think of a very tasty and crumbly crumpet.
Cooking Time : 15 minutes
Preparation Time : 10 minutes
Vegetarian : Yes
Preheat your oven to 220°C / Gas6
Ingredients:
• 50g melted butter, plus extra for greasing the tins
• 250ml milk
• 1 large egg
• 160g polenta
• 30g cornflour
• 3 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 & 1/2 teaspoons caster sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
How to cook it
1. Grease your muffin tin with melted butter, set aside.
2. Get a large bowl; add the milk, eggs and 50g melted butter. Whisk together.
3. In a separate bowl, combine polenta, cornflour, baking powder, caster sugar and salt. (The reason the dry ingredients are in a separate bowl is so that they can be well mixed now and then they don’t need a lot of mixing when you add them to the liquid which would make the cornbread tougher )
4. Next, add the dry ingredients to the wet then stir with a wooden spoon until they are only just combined. If you mix it too much the polenta bread will be tough.
5. If you want to add any of the different flavours I suggest; put a few spoonfuls of the mixture into a separate bowl, gently mix with the extra ingredients then spoon each individual into a muffin tin.
6. Once all of the mixture is in the muffin tins, bake for 15 minutes or until golden and just barely firm enough for a skewer to come out of the centre dry.
KIDS CORNER
Both of my kids really enjoyed all of the different versions I made of this recipe; even those that I thought were a bit tough. This is a fun recipe to make together as there is a lot of measuring and mixing, but it’s all very straight forward and the results arrive quickly. Kids will always enjoy making something that they can add their own flavours to; this is the savoury cupcake we’ve all been looking for!!