This is really a follow-up or expansion on Friday's posting on homemade scrapple. I took the time to look up polenta on Wikipedia and got a brain full. Basically, polenta is any mush, hot and fluid, or cold, solidified, sliced and refried, made from any grain grit or flour. Often, the grain is maize, especially in Mexico and points south. So strictly speaking, scrapple is a pork/corn meal polenta. The spectrum of polentas pretty much spans the specialty "puddings" of the western world: scrapple, liver pudding, hasty pudding, haggis, corn meal mush, Indian pudding, etc, etc, etc. Tripping around in Wikipedia to all of the variations is an interesting diversion.
So my comments from yesterday about the boundless possibilities stands, or even expands. Saturday I tried lamb with barley grits (actually 2/3 barley grits to1/3 white corn meal). I basically used Friday's recipe with substitutions of the broth, meat, grain, and seasoning.
1 c. lamb broth taken to 2 1/4 with water and brought to a boil with
~1/2 c. finely chopped lamb meat
1/2 t. salt
1 t. dried rosemary (chopped fine, might have preferred powdered but didn't have it)
1/4 t. dried mustard
1 small clove garlic
Blend 1/4 c. white corn meal with 1/4 c. cold water
At the boil, stir in 1/2 c. barley grits and the white corn meal slurry
With constant stirring and a flame disperser, return to the boil and cook for 20 min.
Turn out into a small loaf pan.
This too turned out to be really good when sliced and fried up in a little butter.
I am pretty excited about the possibilities of this whole polenta thing.
Having immersed myself in other pork products on Sunday morning (Found a real butcher in Fort Collins, Co) I felt I should not exclude the scrapple, so I gave it a shot. Consistency was okay, fell apart a little while cooking, my be my frying technique. I noticed some recipes call for buckwheat flower. Will this help act as a binder?? Also didn't nail it with the flavor combo, and felt that my ratio of pork to cornmeal was a little high on the cornmeal side. I saved some stock and pork for a second shot, so i'll try it again here soon, but if anyone has any other tips, throw 'em out there. I am excited to play around with the whole idea though. I had some cornmeal lying around for the exploration fop polenta and the wonderful possibilities it presents when making killer breakfasts. I've been using it as a "biscuit" and then throwing some tomato, and other veggies stewed down a little over top, with a poached egg and a quick lime, yoghurt sauce as an alternative to eggs benedict. Pretty fun stuff. Next, an exploration into different types of cornmeal. Why is the stuff labeled "polenta" twice as expensive...Greenwashers???
ReplyDeleteAndy
I think that the binding i provided by cooking the starch. Corn meal is probably top of the list as far as binders goes. Make sure you are cooking it long enough. When I used 2/1 barley/corn meal it was little more crumbly, I thought in part because of the barley and maybe also because the barley was grits rather than meal (coarser grind).
DeleteYeah, I never buy "polenta"; it's just corn meal with an attitude.