I recently made some corn bread on my own from scratch for the first time. The flavour was perfect as was the general firmness/crumbliness of the bread. However, the corn meal in the recipe resulted in an extremely gritty eating experience. It was like eating uncooked steel cut oats. But it's not like you can make corn bread without corn meal…
Anyway, every other corn bread I have ever had, whether it is made from scratch or from a pre-packaged mix, has not had this gritty quality.
I used a relatively fresh purchased package of yellow stone ground corn meal. It was open for about 3 days since I used a tablespoon in another recipe, but I stored it in an airtight container in the freezer (which is apparently what one should do).
Did I purchase bad corn meal? Is there something I can do to modify the recipe and make it less gritty?
Here is the recipe I am using.
Best Answer
If you don't want gritty bread, use finely milled polenta. Roughly milled polenta is like semolina, and results in a gritty batter. Finely milled polenta is like flour, and results in a smooth batter.
I don't know the proper names for the different milling grades in English. I don't mean cornflour, which is pure maize starch from the inside of the maize kernel. I mean whole maize kernels milled so the particles are the same size as wheat flour. It is yellow and tastes the same way as the rough one, only the texture is different.
The two types of polenta differ in their water absorption and soaking times, so you may want to use a recipe developed for the fine milled type, or tweak your own recipe.
To give you a better example, here is what you need:
You don't want to use the rough form, which looks like this: