Wotou (Steamed Cornmeal Cones)

Variations

• With sorghum or millet: northern kitchens mix whatever grain the year gave them into the cornmeal, which is why a tray of them comes out in several colours, as in the photograph. It was a question of supply rather than of taste.
• More wheat flour: take the wheat up to half and they are much softer and far easier to shape, and correspondingly less of a corn bread. Thirty per cent is the compromise.
• Xiao wotou (小窝头): the small "palace" version, shaped bite-sized and enriched with chestnut flour or sugar. This is the one the Empress Dowager story is attached to.
• Filled: some are made around red bean paste or dates, which means giving up the hollow — so they have to be made much smaller. It is a variation that abandons the structure.
• Steamed then fried: split a cold one and fry the cut faces until the edges crisp. That is reviving leftovers' dry-heat route.

Tips

• Cornbread and arepas have already set the premise down, and this bread is the question that comes next. Cornbread is flat about it — "corn has no gluten at all … no network to build in the first place" — and arepas note that dough and gluten files cornmeal under having nothing there to build with. Both are right, and both are thin: one is a batter poured into a pan, the other a flat cake the width of a palm. Neither deals with what happens when you want thickness.
• The hollow is the answer. A dough that does not rise cooks at the thickness you shaped, so a fist-sized lump is raw in the middle. Hotteok solves the same problem by pressing: flatten it and the conduction distance is short enough for the inside to cook. Wotou does not flatten — it removes the middle. The wall is a centimetre thick and that centimetre has an outside face and an inside face.
• Why the water has to be boiling, again from a neighbour. Arepas say cornmeal stirred with cold water "stays wet powder", and solve it by using masarepa, which is precooked. Wotou does that cooking at the moment of mixing: boiling water gelatinises part of the starch and that is the glue. Songpyeon does exactly this with rice flour; only the grain is different.
• Push the wall up with your thumb; do not make a hole. Punching into a finished ball splits the wall. Start with the thumb as the axis and work the wall upward and the surface is never broken.
• The hole faces down. Steaming explains that the method runs on steam condensing on a cold surface and releasing its latent heat. Hole upward, that condensate pools inside and the base goes sodden; hole down, the same steam climbs the inner wall and leaves.
• Wet your hands in salted water. With no gluten, this dough is held together by moisture rather than by stretch. Handled dry it crazes, and those cracks open in the steamer.
• They harden as they cool, and that is retrogradation rather than drying. Cooking rice explains it as amylose recrystallising. Three minutes back in the steamer undoes it — better than a microwave.
• The sugar is recent. This was the staple of years when corn was what there was, and sugar arrived after it became a treat. Past a tablespoon it covers the corn.