Stone Ground Cornmeal
Stone ground cornmeal
Cornmeal has been the unsung hero of so many kitchen tasks and specialties for so long, it hurts sometimes when I think of how grits have so completely eclipsed this versatile and indispensable product.
Click here for a link to my cornbread recipes, here for a hoecake recipe, and here for a cookie recipe.
Technically speaking, even grits are "meal," but use caution if you switch around these products in recipes. Even the Italian cousin of grits, polenta, is often a bit coarser in grind than coarse cornmeal, and that can alter the trajectory of your dishes significantly.
It's All About Texture
To be clear, I am talking about field corn products here. In this case organic, stone-ground corn. Field corn ripens and dries out in the field and it never has the sweetness of sweet corn on the cob.
Any grist mill grinding corn will be making cornmeal at some point. That's just the way corn behaves when it is ground in a mill. There are several ways to sort out all of the various grades of products in a grist mill, but the very simplest way is to use screens of varying fineness.
Coarse cornmeal has a high amount of semolina-sized corn particles (tiny grits, actually, since semolina is made from durum wheat) mixed in with the more floury parts of the ground up corn kernels. It is positively the best thing for cornbread, spoonbread, dredging for frying, hushpuppies, pizza peels, coo-coo, and cornmeal mush by many other names..
Fine cornmeal can be used for many of the above dishes, but it really shines when used for hoecakes (also called johnnycakes). It lacks the preponderance of small, hard grits that gives coarse cornmeal its texture.
So if cooking from scratch is your thing, try your hand at some of these dishes today. You may find yourself wondering why more home chefs haven't gone to the trouble to incorporate cornmeal into their arsenal of gourmet ingredients.
Here are some links to our selection of organic, stone ground cornmeal.