The other day I posted the recipe for the slow cooked pork ribs in a tomato sauce. I should post the other part of the meal that made it a perfect dinner - polenta.
Polenta, in short, is a cornmeal porridge that's a common dish in Northern Italy. Long before corn was brought from the Americas to Europe, polenta was already a staple food—it just wasn't made from corn, obviously. The name originally comes from the Latin word for "pearled grain" (like barley), and the dish, a gruel that could be made with all sorts of grains and legumes, predates the Roman Empire.
There are a lot of rules people say you need to follow to make polenta, like using a wooden spoon, stirring in only one direction, adding the polenta to boiling water, and stirring constantly. And yet, of all the things worth knowing about how to cook great polenta, those might be some of the least important (and, frankly, partially incorrect) lessons.
Forget those. What's really important is using the right ratio of liquid to cornmeal and allowing the cornmeal to properly hydrate.
Now I am going to give you another tip - ignore those recipes and try this one.
I've made polenta on the stove top many times and I have always invariably been splattered with the hot, bubbling liquid. Lord, that stuff is like magma!
Do yourself a favour and make this version the bakes away in the oven. You mix it, cover it, pop it in the oven, and pretty well forget about it. No burned arms. No mess all over the stove to clean up. Delicious polenta every time.
You can play around with the recipe too. I like to add goat cheese. Sometimes I'll add chopped tomatoes. You can try different herbs as well - I used basil this time because I had some in the fridge that needed to be used up. The recipe is pretty well foolproof and you can play with a bit.
Enjoy!
Oven-Baked Polenta
3/4 cornmeal (sometimes labelled as polenta)
1 1/4 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon pepper
3 cups water (you can sub in chicken or vegetable broth for more flavour)
1/4 cup milk
2 tablespoons butter
1 teaspoon chopped fresh marjoram
Preheat the oven to 425 degrees
In an ovenproof baking dish with a lid, whisk together the cornmeal, salt, pepper and water. Cover and bake for 30 minutes, stirring halfway through.
Remove from oven, add milk, butter and marjoram. Whisk briskly until smooth. Serve immediately.
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