I have a recipe that calls for a mix of corn and wheat flours, but my local grocery stores (in the south east US) only carry corn meal.
- What is the difference between corn flour and corn meal?
- Can I safely use corn meal in the place of corn flour?
Baking – the difference between corn flour and corn meal
bakingcorncornmealsubstitutions
Related Solutions
The problem here is that you're comparing two very different recipes: Northern cornbread (yellow meal, equal parts flour, a tablespoon or so of sugar) and Southern cornbread (white meal, no or little flour, no sugar). There's no real point in trying to mix and match or interpolate between the recipes, any more than than it would make sense to make something halfway between cioppino and bouillabaisse, since they are both just fish stew.
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:
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Best Answer
The difference between the two can be seen below (the post it is from is an experiment comparing corn meal and flour used in anadema bread):
The corn flour is the white, finer ingredient on the right. The first obvious difference is that the texture will differ between the two. The second is that it would have different uses. Both would be effective at displacing gluten-containing flours (as in, neither would be helpful in gluten formation).
In terms of substitution, however, corn meal is likelier substituted by something like semolina flour and corn flour is likelier better substituted by quinoa or garbanzo bean flour.