Monday, April 23, 2007

Pani di mais

Recently I decided to just try to mix different flours and see what would happen of my bread. I was into corn, so I made two different 'corny' breads :)

Pane con farina di polenta / Cornmeal bread
To make this bread, I mixed about 1/2 and 1/2 regular white flour and cornmeal. As usual, dissolve 2 tsp yeast in 1 cup warm water, add a little sugar and let it foam. Add flour to this mixture until it's workable with your hands (start with 2 cups white flour and 2 cups cornmeal and keep adding). Add about 2 tbsp salt. Knead for 10 minutes, let it rest for 1 1/2 hour, knead for 2 minutes and divide in two shapes. Make nice and deep lines on the surface of the loaf, to obtain the drawing you prefer, and let it rest for another hour or so. Bake at 400 F for ~30 min leaving a pot of water in the oven. Cool down on wire racks.
This bread looked really nice and the taste was also very good. I just didn't like too much some of the cornmeal grains that remained too crunchy. It improved when toasted. Anyway, thus, I tried with a finer corn flour.

Pane con farina di mais / Corn flour bread
This was a really really good bread, probably ranked among the best breads I made recently. The procedure is similar to above, except for the fact that I used 2/3 corn flour and 1/3 white flour, more or less. The bread was soft but not fluffy and the taste delicious. It really reminded me of eating polenta, although it was a bread!

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