I want to serve polenta as an alternative to mash and pasta, but every time I make it, it resembles (and tastes like) wet cement. What’s the secret?
Zoe, Abergavenny
“A lot of polenta you buy in the shops tends to be instant, which is the worst thing in the world,” says chef Theo Randall, author of the upcoming The Italian Deli Cookbook (out in March). Yes, the stuff cooks in minutes, but the consistency is hard to get right. “You put it in hot water and think it’s all wet and runny, then all of a sudden it sets like rubber.”
Polenta, or cornmeal, comes in many guises, and all are welcome round Rachel Roddy’s, the quick-cook stuff included. “It’s great with enough butter and cheese,” the Guardian’s Rome-based food correspondent says. “The most delicious polenta I’ve ever had was a white one with cuttlefish in Veneto, but that kind of more rustic polenta needs very careful cooking, so it’s soft and absorbs all the water.”
Randall recommends bramata, a coarse yellow cornmeal. He slowly whisks 250g into a litre of boiling salted water (to serve four; you could easily halve the quantities) – “spend two or three minutes whisking it in” – then cooks it for about 40 minutes. “The trick is to cook it really slowly, so the bramata expands,” Randall explains. “When it’s done, the polenta comes away from the sides of the pan and there’ll be little crusts all over the outside.”
Stirring is also part and parcel of the process, but how much is a point of some contention. As Marcella Hazan writes in The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking: “Stirring polenta in an open pot for the entire time it cooks undoubtedly yields the best product, most in terms of fragrance and, to a certain – but lesser – extent, in terms of overall flavour.” She does, however, admit that you can make “a very good polenta with hardly any stirring”.
Next, season very generously. “The problem is, people assume that polenta on its own is going to be lovely,” says Randall, who counts olive oil or butter and plenty of parmesan as indispensables to overcome its inherent blandness. “It then needs quite saucy things,” Roddy says, whose go-tos include ratatouille, tomato sauce (and more parmesan) and ragù. “If anything is a bit dry, it feels mean.”
There are myriad things you can do with your polenta, so it’s always worth making extra. It sets when cold, and Roddy cuts any leftovers into triangles, then fries them in oil and serves with peperonata. Or grill it, though if you plan on doing that, Randall recommends upping the polenta-to-water ratio to 300g per litre: “Cook it for the same amount of time, then pour into a flat tray and cool.” Cut, griddle (no need for any oil) and serve, as Randall does at his restaurant at the InterContinental in London, with olive oil, fresh chilli, parsley, wild mushrooms, a few roast tomatoes and rocket.
Alternatively, he says, you could Randall cuts up the grilled polenta, tosses it with a little milk and semolina flour, “to give it a crisp coating”, and deep-fries in sunflower oil. “Serve that with chopped salted anchovies, fresh chilli and lemon,” he says. “It’s the perfect thing to have with a negroni.”
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