I love polenta, especially in the winter. It goes well with grilled or roasted meats, vegetables, fish, and poultry. It can be served for breakfast with butter. If made in advance and left to firm up overnight, it can be cut in slabs and grilled. And if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t mind firing up the deep-fryer, you can make polenta fries. (Which I love to eat, but not clean up after. Option B is to cut the polenta into batons and fry them in olive oil a skillet )
I keep a bag of polenta at home, and used to make it by stirring it on the stovetop, which took nearly an hour of constant vigilance, not to mention cleaning up the stovetop afterwards, and nursing a few burns on my arm from getting splattered by hot polenta.
When I arrived in France, I was surprised at the prevalence of instant polenta, which is polenta that’s finely ground so it absorbs liquid quickly. (There’s also precooked polenta grains, and precooked sliced polenta, which were new to me, too.) Admittedly, it’s very easy to make and is ready in about five minutes. People don’t seem to mind it, but I like the texture of traditional polenta, so stick with that.
If you want to take your polenta to the next level, seek out stone-ground polenta. Stone-ground polenta (like stone-ground cornmeal) includes the whole grain, and contains the germ and the bran. It also has retains more of its flavor during grinding since the stones grinding the corn don’t heat it up, which can diminish its flavor. But I also like the irregularity of it. It looks like real corn, not like powder.
I’ve been cooking polenta for years, stirring it on the stovetop, but recently I remembered this technique, which was introduced in the pre-internet days by the great Paula Wolfert. The recipe was in her book, Mediterranean Grains & Greens, a treatise I sadly had to leave behind in the States, but she attributed to a recipe on the back of a package of Golden Pheasant polenta, although the California-based company no longer seems to be in business. 😔
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I’d made it way-back-when, but for whatever reason, I continued making polenta the traditional way. It reminds me of a quote from Judy Rodgers in the Zuni Café Cookbook, something along the lines of finding, and sticking to, a harder way of doing something. For better or for worse, that’s sometimes as I operate. Old habits die hard, I suppose. ...
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