Polenta (Slow-Stirred Cornmeal, Soft or Set and Grilled)

Variations

• Polenta taragna: from Valtellina in Lombardy, with buckwheat flour mixed into the maize, which makes it grey and much nuttier. Very heavily loaded with cheese (Bitto, Casera) and butter. The name comes from the tarai, the stick used to stir it.
• Polenta concia / uncia: Piedmont and Valle d'Aosta. Cheese and butter go in in layers from partway through the cooking, to something near the consistency of fondue. It is the last step of this recipe taken much further.
• Polenta pasticciata: set polenta sliced thin and baked in layers with ragù, béchamel and cheese. Accurately described as lasagna with the pasta replaced.
• Fried polenta: set, cubed and deep-fried, crisp outside and creamy in. A common aperitivo snack (deep-frying).
• Instant polenta: precooked and dried, ready in 5-8 minutes. Usable when you are in a hurry, but the corn flavour is shallow and the texture uniform — closer to a different food than to the forty-minute version. Follow the packet's water ratio, not this one.
• What it is eaten with: in the north, stews, ragù, roast meat, mushrooms, gorgonzola. The ragù from spaghetti bolognese works straight over it, and it also suits a vegetable-heavy broth like minestrone.
• The same idea elsewhere: Romanian mămăligă, Argentine polenta con salsa de carne (carried there by emigrants) and the grits of the American South are all the same maize porridge. Ghana's fufu shares the "staple you make by stirring" logic too. Potatoes fill the same place as mashed potatoes.
• Italy's other staples here: risotto does this job with rice, gnocchi with potato, cacio e pepe with pasta.

Tips

• One part meal to five of water is the reference for soft polenta. Drop to 1:4 for polenta you intend to set. Weigh it — measured by volume, cornmeal varies by over 20% with the grind.
• Use the coarse grind (bramata). Fine meal (fioretto) cooks in twenty minutes but tastes flat and loses the grain you can feel between your teeth, which is the texture of the dish. Treat anything labelled "instant" as a separate ingredient.
• Salt goes in the water first. The meal absorbs water as it cooks, so salt added at the end never gets inside and sits on the surface (salt and seasoning).
• Rain it in thin, whisking throughout. Lumps are the one mistake here you cannot undo: once the meal clumps, the outside cooks and the inside stays dry powder.
• Heavy base, lowest flame. For forty minutes the meal is settling and cooking on the bottom, so a little too much heat spreads a scorched taste through everything (heat control).
• The forty minutes is not negotiable. That is how long the corn starch takes to gelatinise fully; short of it, the texture is sandy. Stirring is there to stop it burning, not to speed it up (thickening sauces).
• Cheese and butter off the heat. At boiling temperature Parmigiano's protein tightens and its fat separates. Residual heat is what should melt it (dairy and heat, building umami).
• Soft polenta gives you five minutes. It keeps firming as it cools, so warm the plates and serve at once. Erring slightly loose is better than erring stiff (serving temperature).
• Cool it completely before slicing. Cut warm, the faces crumble and they slump in the pan. A spell in the fridge firms it further and makes it easier to handle.
• Do not turn it early on the griddle. Touched before the face has set on the metal, that face sticks and tears away. Four or five undisturbed minutes is the whole technique (browning, grilling).
• Setting leftovers is the proper move, not reheating them. This is why Italian households slice and fry yesterday's polenta rather than loosening it back into porridge: reheating needs more water and the texture does not come back (reviving leftovers).
• Washing the pot: fill it with water and leave it half an hour and the set layer lifts off in one piece. Do not attack it with a scourer.