APOLLONIA POILANE: The corn flour bread
is a recipe I developed when I was
a student at Harvard College.
On Sunday nights, we had roasts that had little cornbreads.
I realized a lot of them called for half corn flour, half wheat
flour.
So I said to myself to make a 100% corn flour bread.
And this was a challenge, because corn flour
doesn't have any gluten in it.
And because it doesn't have gluten, it doesn't rise.
After my graduation, I was able to start
working in the bakehouse on my cornbread.
And over the course of 10 years, I
created the first Poilane gluten-free breads.
But it wasn't so much that I was trying
to make a gluten-free bread as much as I was just
trying to get the pure expression of corn,
the richness and the sweetness of its flavors.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
This recipe, the challenge was how to make it 100% corn flour.
The traditional ways you substitute gluten
are adding a laundry list of ingredients
that I wanted to stay away from because I didn't
have any notion of how they really affected us
in the long run.
And the solution for me was flaxseeds and oat milk.
The combination of both create this bind
that keeps the dough together.
So we have flaxseeds, hazelnuts, corn flour, yeast, salt,
and oat milk.
We start off with the flaxseeds that we
are going to squish with the mortar and pestle.
And you really want to use one that's
deep enough because the flaxseeds tend
to fly away or try and escape their fate.
So you squish them, and that might take a couple of minutes.
You can also use a blender, if you have one.
That's absolutely fine.
Once you've squished them entirely,
you will have a sort of flour-ish coarse grain,
to which you're going to add some of the oat milk.
You can use commercial milk, as well as homemade milk.
And let sit at room temperature so that the mulsh
can come together.
So once you've rested the ingredients,
you get this mulsh.
See how this comes together?
This is very liquidy.
After 24 hours, it becomes mulshy and soupy.
So the combination of the flaxseeds and the oat milk
is what creates that binder, which substitutes gluten.
So the next step is crushing the hazelnuts.
You can use a food processor.
Or if you don't have one, just use a solid knife
and squish the hazelnuts.
And they can be coarse or they can be very fine.
Just don't get them to the point where it's hazelnut powder
because you want to have the crunch of it in the bread.
I used hazelnuts in this recipe because they're very fragrant
and they can bring up the flavors of the cornbread,
especially as you toast a slice.
If you're allergic to hazelnuts, you
can replace them by almonds, walnuts, pecans,
or forget them altogether.
But the thing here is the hazelnuts
adds to the flavor profile, and that's what I like about it.
Then you're going to oil your mold.
This is a tin mold, and you can use cooking oil--
sunflower, rapeseed oil, any oil that will work well
with a high temperature.
You can use butter as a substitute.
I would recommend the oil because this bread tends
to be a little sticky, so the oil actually
works better than the butter, which might
create a little bit of a crust.
So I have corn flour.
I'm going to add to it the flaxseeds and oat milk mixture.
Corn flour is the flour from the corn.
So it's the corn grain that has been squished,
and a little bit like you would have for the wheats, the rye,
or any flours, really, it's the grain
that's crushed so thinly that it's a flour texture.
Cornstarch is the starch from the corn grain.
So you really need to stick to corn flour
and stay away from cornstarch, cornmeal, grits,
because it'll be too thick.
So we have corn flour.
We have our binder.
We have some yeast that I'm going to put on one side.
Salt, which I will put on the other side.
I have the hazelnuts and the oat milk.
So I'm just going to mix the ingredients.
And it's a pretty easy mix because there's
a lot of textures.
And the trick here is just to make sure that the coarser
textures don't fool you into thinking that it's properly
mixed when it actually isn't.
So you should not have any more flour pockets.
That's a common mistake.
You wouldn't want to stumble on a little pouch of flour
as you're eating your cornbread.
I am using a spatula because the texture, as you can see,
is very liquid.
It's almost like a cake.
This is, among other things, because there's no glutens
and you have a lot of course ingredients in it.
So once it's together-- and a visual cue is as you spoon it,
so to speak, you don't see any more flour pockets--
then we're going to put it in the mold and let it rise.
So here we go.
Here, we're going to let it rest.
And we're going to have a small rise, not a very big one.
But the main thing here is that the flaxseed and oat milk
mixture is what's going to create the bind, versus just
a log of corn flour stuck together.
So we're going to let it sit until it's risen.
It'll be about a finger away from the top.
It's not much-- right now, I can only fit about two fingers--
but that's enough.
I'm going to cover the mold, and this is just an effort
to avoid having a crust.
So cover it up and let it rest until we bake it.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Right now, the corn flour loaf has risen.
And what is very specific about this corn flour recipe
is that it only rises once.
It's almost caressing the top.
In the oven, it might rise a little more, but not much.
So do not be worried.
If it has not risen as much, that's fine, as well.
So right here, we're at the level it should be.
I think the main visual cue you're looking for here
is a rise over the course of the two hours,
versus what it was as you poured it into the mold.
If you have that rise, then bake it.
If it's not at the top, that's OK.
Really, really what you want here
is to have that momentum and volume.
Remember how, when I poured the dough,
it was very sticky, grainy?
Very much like a cake, but a coarse cake.
Here, it has risen and there's a little bit of air in it.
But if you touch it, you can feel
that it's very very delicate.
So that's why you want to be very careful with this recipe,
because the structure here, the lack of gluten,
is very fragile.
And you want to make sure, as you put it into the oven,
you do it as delicately as possible to maintain
the structure that has been created here.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Now, this looks well-cooked for me.
This is the maximum you want to have it.
It's brown on the sides.
It should not get darker than that on the sides.
You can see the yellowish orangeish colors in the center.
The fact that it's lighter, the fact
that it has a little few cracks on the top, that's
absolutely fine.
So make sure you protect your hands.
Use the linen cloth, and there we go.
And you put it on the grill because you
want every side to cool down.
If it's stuck in the mold, don't panic.
Let it cool on the rack first, and then maybe just tap it
a little bit on the surface to help it unstick,
and remove the bread at that point.
The bread should cool until you can take it in your hands
and it feels cold or at room temperature.
I know it's torture, I know it's long, but at least an hour.
You don't want to eat warm bread because it's still cooking.
And especially with this bread, because the crumb is
so delicate, you have to make sure
that it's entirely cooled because it
may break the structure as you cut through it.
So you have here a corn flour bread.
What I'm looking for here is a rise that's regular.
So on the top, it's flat.
The sides are clean.
The bottom part hasn't stuck to the mold.
That's thanks to the oil, but it's thoroughly cooked.
The fact that it's a little darker on some sides
versus others, that could just be the oven,
and it's absolutely fine.
You should smell the hazelnut, and then
a little bit of the corn.
But don't be deterred by the fact
that you will first smell the hazelnuts.
They're very powerful if you're using them in the recipe.
I take this loaf and hold it with one hand.
A trick is to hold a loaf at arm's length
to have a better grip.
And this is relevant for this loaf,
especially, because it is a coarser crust.
It's less resilient.
It has less elasticity inside.
So use a serrated knife, and then just cut through it.
So once you've cut it open, you want a regular hazelnut layout.
Thick and dense crumb, but yet, it's speckled with air pockets.
The crust will be very thin, more like a pain de mie.
And the crumb is a little denser than my wheat sourdough loaf.
In some ways, it's closer to the rye bread.
Another good cue is that the crumb, while moist, is not wet.
A lot of the gluten-free breads have this very wet texture.
In this, it is humid.
When you touch it, you can feel that there's
a little bit of humidity.
But it's not wet.
And as I cut through it, it stays in one piece.
Now, that's another cue.
If you cut through it and it starts sticking,
maybe the loaf wasn't cooled down enough
or maybe it was lacking some baking.
And if that's the case, then it's
probably an oven adjustment problem.
So this bread is really amazing toasted.
And it's really delicious because it brings out
the corn notes to it.
It almost smells like popcorn.
But fresh, it's just as delicious.
So I'm going to slather a little bit of butter on it.
And the crumb is delicate here, so as you put butter,
make sure that you are delicate in spreading your topping.
I'm going to put butter and honey on it.
It's very rich.
It's a bread that will really feed you.
So I really like the initial bites in this bread
because you have a crust that, while thin,
has a very distinctive taste.
It almost has those popcorn flavors.
But it also has some texture.
There is the hazelnuts in it.
There's the flaxseeds, and that mixed with the crumb.
It has almost a granular texture.
And if you put fresh butter on it,
that just expands on those flavors.
And then it has the lingering tastes and lingering notes
are the butteriness, not because I put butter,
but because corn has this butteriness to it.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
This bread is one of the breads that stores
the least amount of time.
After two, three days, it might go bad.
This bread, as it goes old, tends to mold.
And that's just because of the lingering humidity.
So try and eat it within the next two, three days of baking.
Don't try and keep it that much longer.
After the second day, toast it to have those corn notes to it.
When I embarked on this journey, I cannot deny that I had
a thought for my mom.
I'm half-French, half-American.
And in creating a corn flour bread,
it was a way of paying homage to my mother, who was American,
and my American roots.
We used yellow corn here, but there
is such a wealth and variety of corn flours and corn flour
colors.
If you have blue corn, if you have white corn,
you should absolutely use those.
The visual cues won't be the same in terms of colorings,
but you can adjust easily to this.
Managing after 10 years to have this slice
is something that I'm very proud of,
and I'm sure that my mom would appreciate the wink
to her adopted culture.
[MUSIC PLAYING]