How To Cook Polenta

Step 1: You will need

Hi there! I'm Matt from the underground cookery school. And today I'm going to do a video cookery lesson for you. I'm going to show you how to make polenta.

Polenta is a cornmeal and you buy it from most supermarkets. What I'm going to do is just take the polenta, so it's milled corn effectively and I'm going to add hot water to it and if grab a wooden spoon, just give it a good old mix. What will happen is over the course of the next 5 or 6 minutes maybe a bit longer maybe 10 minutes this will cook out.

I'm just going to add the rest of the water to it and then we'll end up with the perfect polenta. So, on the stove it goes. Just give it a bit of a whiz.

Turn it down a little bit and there we go. It's got quite a high gluten content in it so it's not uncommon for people to use this as an ingredient in making pasta and as you can see it's just gently stiffing so I'm going to turn it down a little bit, just to prevent that from happening and like I said in about ten minutes time we'll come back to that pan and see how we're doing. Well, that's now been cooking away for about seven or eight minutes.

It's really stiffened up now and I'm going to plate it up just to give you an idea. That's exactly the texture that you should be looking for. Now you can use that as a base for your dish, you could also actually, funny enough another method that I came across recently, which you can just set that in the fridge cause it's quite amazingly there's quite a high constitution of gelatin in there.

So if you put that in the fridge and you do it in shapes you can actually set it and over here I've got a griddle pan but it actually works quite nicely once you've got a set block of polenta. You can then shove it on the griddle pan and get those lovely charred marks and that's another way of cooking with it. So there you have “how to cook polenta”.