Not your mother's corn grits, unless you grew up in Venice. This is Northern Italy's answer to macaroni and cheese. The only trick to cooking polenta is to keep stirring.
Serve this rich, soft polenta as the star attraction in your dinner, or as the perfect accompaniment to lamb or any full-flavored meat course. This is so easy and intensely unctious it makes me wonder why anyone would be intimidated by polenta.
Polenta is nothing more than coarsely ground corn meal. In fact, you can make this with ordinary corn meal, but the texture will be mushier. Most of us more commonly associate pasta with Italian cooking, but in Northern Italy, polenta is the traditional staple. It is also common to the American south where we call it “corn grits.”
Making polenta is an ideal opportunity for collaborative cooking. It is easy, but it requires frequent, nearly constant stirring. But stirring is hard to mess up, so this is perfect even if you’re unsure of your co-cook’s culinary talents.
Polenta:
- 3 cups boiling water
- 1/2 tsp sea salt (or omit if your blue cheese is very salty)
- 1 cup polenta, corn grits or coarse corn meal
- To water boiling in a large, heavy bottom saucepan, toss in the salt and slowly whisk in the polenta. Reduce the flame to a simmer.
- Stir with a long-handled wooden spoon. Keep the simmer gentle. If the polenta starts bubbling, those bubbles burst and a splatter of hot corn meal can give your stirrer a nasty burn. That’s why you use the long handle on the spoon.
- Continue to cook, stirring until the polenta pulls away from the sides of the pan, about 25 minutes. Remove the polenta from the heat.
The Flavorings:
Polenta is pretty bland all by itself. Italians serve it with a marinara sauce or simply topped with grated cheese. This recipe takes that one step further. As William Blake advised, "The road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom."
- 3 Tbsp butter
- 1/4 lb Parmigiano Reggiano, grated
- 1/4 lb Mascarpone
- 1/4 lb Gorgonzola, crumbled
- Freshly ground black pepper, to taste
- Fold in the butter and cheeses and give it a good grind of black pepper. Don’t overstir. Taste and adjust the seasoning if necessary. If you’re not ready to serve yet, put a lid on the pan and set it on the back of the stove.
Yield: 4 servings
Serving Suggestions:
Plate this up with the lamb chops, for example, on top of the polenta. Alternatively, turn it out into a serving bowl and garnish it with a sprig of fresh rosemary and a few shavings of Parmigiana Reggiana.
Variation:
Before adding the cheeses, fold in a good handful of baby spinach leaves. Stir until the spinach is just wilted and then add the cheeses.
Any blue cheese will suffice in this recipe, but Gorgonzola keeps it traditionally Northern Italian. For some other blues that would work nicely in this dish, check out Eleven French Blue Cheeses Compared and Blue Cheese from Tasmania? If your family is blue-averse (my sincere sympathies), this recipe is almost as good with a good sharp cheddar.
Mascarpone is a slightly sweeter cream cheese. Substitute regular cream cheese or leave it out entirely. This dish is still scrumptious with just blue cheese and Parmigiano Reggiano. A lesser Parmesan will do in a pinch, but not, please the stuff in the green cardboard cannister. All of the cheeses for this dish are available from iGourmet.com.
I can get polenta even from my sad little neighborhood supermarket, but if you won't be making your monthly trek into town for awhile, you can order it from Bob's Red Mill.
If you like polenta you might also want to try:
Leftovers:
Leftovers will keep in the refrigerator for several days, and re-heat nicely in the microwave oven.
Clean up:
You should. This cheesy mixture, when cool, makes a very good glue. If you tend to put off washing your dishes until the morning after (or if you suspect your dinner partner may wax amorous after dinner), make sure the polenta pot and all the serving dishes are in the sink soaking.
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