25% maize meal bread | The Contemporary Loaf

There’s a submit from the lengthy distant previous (2017) on this web site, by Wendy (Lazy Idler) describing one in all her bread tasting open home experiments the place totally different sourdough loaves have been made every with a unique flour making up 25% of the flour. It was a beautiful, attention-grabbing learn, and a beautiful attention-grabbing experiment too, particularly for the reason that flours used have been fairly diversified and there have been some non-wheat variants together with amaranth, and one made with entire corn flour, which ended up being the clear winner by way of tasting.

Fairly inspiring and therefore this loaf!

Up to now I’ve made loaves with maize meal, however all the time made a porridge/scald first with the maize meal. Which I suppose is the ‘appropriate’ method, but in addition wasn’t problem free in that the porridge tended to lump and was troublesome to include within the last dough.

This bread was a lot easier to make, just by incorporating the maize meal as a dry ingredient with the opposite flours. The dough was gritty when mixing, and it did not droop regardless that the hydration was slightly increased than Wendy’s. The grittiness did not actually come by means of to the crumb of the ultimate loaf, though you could possibly really feel a slight grit within the crust.

By way of the expertise of consuming the bread it was just like consuming a maize meal porridge (or as we name it right here, mielie pap). Very filling (satiating), pretty bland to the style, made beautiful toast, and general ‘substantial’ is a phrase I might use to explain.

The maize meal used is a South African maize meal, which in these components is all the time made with white maize and I might say is ‘medium’ floor – not as coarse because the polenta that I’ve entry to which is made with yellow maize, and positively not as high-quality as corn starch! So, I assume you’d have a totally totally different expertise when you used a yellow maize meal.