Bread – make ciabatta with corn flour

breadcornflour

This is my ciabatta recipe:

4 cups flour
2 cups warm water
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon yeast

Mix water and yeast
Add flour and salt
Stir into a heavy batter
Set aside covered at least 8 hours
Heat oven to 400
Bake on a flour dusting for 30 minutes

What would happen if I substituted corn flour for wheat flour? Perhaps half and half?

Best Answer

As jolenealaska pointed out in a comment, corn flour has no gluten, which is essential to the texture of most breads and many other baked goods. Unless you replace the gluten with vital wheat gluten or some kind of gluten substitute, your corn flour loaf would have a crumbly texture very uncharacteristic of ciabatta.

rumtscho added:

If by "corn flour" you mean the white starch from inside the corn, you probably won't notice much difference in the ciabatta if you use a bread dough like gluten to starch ratio, and if you do, it'll be some lack of flavor. If you mean to use whole milled corn, it will be more interesting, but also give you texture problems, similar to whole wheat ciabatta.

The texture problems you'll get with whole milled corn (commonly sold as "corn meal") will be less if the meal is ground finely and more if the meal is ground coarsely (as for polenta).

Stephen Eure gave this suggestion:

You might consult a few recipes for Anadama bread - a bread that is popular in New England - made with some corn meal and wheat flour. It is usually sweetened with molasses. Two things that are common to recipes for Anadama bread are cooking the corn meal first (and allowing it to cool) to soften the corn and adding sweetener to amplify the taste of the corn. ... You might also find you need more yeast or a longer fermentation time.

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