Maize and sunflower seed bread

Last week I was considering baking a bread with corn porridge to use up some polenta lurking around in the back of the cupboard. As a northern European, cooking with corn is unfamiliar to me and associated with Italian and/or American cuisine. As a child in the 80's, I thought maize = corn = tinned sweetcorn. Tinned sweetcorn was either an unwelcome addition to tuna mayonnaise or one of the 10,000 things crammed into salads along with boiled eggs and cubes of cheese. I was convinced that one of the key benefits of adulthood, would be not finding sweetcorn hiding in my food (and getting to mix lemonade and cordial whenever I wanted).

When I first got my hands on Tartine #3, I flicked straight past the corn porridge bread drawn in by less humble more exotic grains. This year, I've baked two types of bread with maize flour and/or polenta from The Handmade Loaf. Both loaves tasted fascinating and smelt so enticing that I decided to make a naturally leavened bread with corn porridge. I picked this recipe from the inspiringly beautiful blog Girl meets Rye.

Polenta bread with sunflower seeds and rosemary

I've incorporate some of the suggested changes mentioned at the end of the original blog post. The night before the bake, I prepared the polenta by mixing together 150g coarse cornmeal with 385g of boiling water in a bowl and covering the mixture with clingfilm. This mixture was left at room temperature to cool and when mixed into the bread was set into a rubbery mass.

For the final mix, I did not add the 50g of water used to dispense the salt as the white bread flour I use tends need less water than average. Before adding in the polenta, I broke it down a little with a fork. However some clumps of about 1-2cm diameter remained, I tried to pinch these out while folding but a few remained. As the temperature is still cool here, the dough seemed a little sluggish so I stretched the bulk fermentation to 4.5hours at room temperature (68C)

These changes made the dough soft, light and easy to handle. Unlike previous attempts the dough was better behaved and not quite as wobbly or worrying as the maize bread which I accidentally over-hydrated a few weeks ago.

The smell and taste of this bread is truly outstanding. There is something special about the combination of maize, rosemary and seeds which just doesn't often feature in traditional English cooking. It's a great combination of add-ins, with a clear procedure which is fully explained here and straightforward to reproduce. I'll definitely be trying more of the recipes from Girl meets Rye in future.

Polenta, Almond and Orange cake

There seems to be a trend towards gluten-free cake. As this is a bread blog, you may (rightly) assume I don't feel the need to jump on the gluten-free band-wagon any time soon. However, why not take the flour out of cake if instead we can stuff it full of almond and cornmeal instead?

The recipe can be found here.

Happy baking!