Polenta is made from coarsely ground corn semolina. The preparation of is surounded by unnecesarry rules and techniques. Most of them are redundant. Making polenta is as easy as baking Berloumi Even if you do it from not pre-cooked ‘ instant ‘ polenta as we do here.
You have to stir the polenta all the time… You have to pour the semolina slowly into the ‘ already boiling ‘ water… You have to stir only with a wooden spoon, always in the same direction. Nothing of this is true!
The most important decision before you start is with which liquid you want to cook the polenta. Water, broth, milk or a mixture of all three. We go for water because milk gives a rather heavy result and bouillon suppresses the taste of the corn.
Stew of chanterelles and onion
Clean 600g chanterelles by cutting off the dirty or woody parts and brushing the sand off. Cut 2 (sweet) onions into four parts and remove the skirts. Bake the chanterelles on high heat in 3 cl corn oil and then remove them with a skimmer from the pan. Now bake the onion slowly for at least twenty minutes in the same pan. Add A pinch of salt and coarse ground black pepper . Meanwhile, cut one piece of garlic finely and let it bake for another minute. Fill the pan with half a liter of white wine and let it boil until there is virtually no wine left. Mix the chanterelles back at the onions. Ready. Save.
Pumpkin with Ras el Hanout
Cut half a butternut pumpkin into large pieces. Remove the seeds with a spoon. The pieces shouldn’t be all the same size and it is not necessary to peel a butternut pumpkin.
Put the pumpkin pieces on an oven plate and mix them with oil, salt and a dose of Ras el Hanout. Mix well and bake for 30 minutes in an oven at 225 °C. Allow to cool and store for later.
Making polenta
Precooking instant cooking polenta takes only five minutes. Cooking real polenta takes about 50 minutes. But the result will be much better when you use real polenta Halve the cooking time by letting the semolina soak in the water for 12 hours in advance.
Use 250 g corn semolina in five times as much water. While stirring bring the liquid to a boil on high heat. Once boiling, lower the heat. The corn semolina will already be thick, but it is not yet cooked. Cook for 50 minutes and stir occasionally over the bottom and along the edges.
When the polenta is ready, turn off the fire and mix in butter and/or olive oil and grated Parmesan. Because with Berloumiwe already have cheese in the recipe we use200 g of our labneh Another tasty product from our dairy.
Everyone is waiting for the polenta but the polenta waits for no one! In other words, when the polenta is ready, it must be eaten. Unless you want to make ‘baked polenta’
Beware! By the time your polenta is ready, the pot of chanterelles and the pumpkin must be ready and warm and Berloumi has to be fried
Baked polenta
While your semolina is cooking, look for a small and low recipient Cover the container with plastic foil and allow it to hang over the edges. When your polenta is ready, fill the bowl with some polenta. You will have to much polenta anyway. Fold the edges over the polenta and flatten it. Put it in the fridge for a few hours and cut in slices
Cut the cooled and now sturdy semolina pudding into slices of about one centimeter. Fry in an non-stick pan in a generous amount of corn oil. Do not turn too fast and fry on two sides until they are really crispy.