My husband accidentally ordered Bob's Red Mill corn flour a few months back instead of masa harina. Corn flour is not a common ingredient as it turns out, decidedly less popular than corn meal, masa harina, and corn starch.
While the bag states that you can substitute corn flour for corn meal in corn bread, we are generally not spring / summer corn bread consumers so this bag has remained unopened. Deciding that there must be something I could with this flour, I did some internet searching and found David Lebovitz's version of the Poilane corn flour bread.
I hadn't tried this bread when we visited Poilane in Paris last year, but I was eager to give this recipe a try given how wonderful both Poilane and David Lebovitz are.
I made a few substitutions to the recipe, one of which may have been a critical omission (only learned while the dough was rising).
I substituted soy milk for oat or cow milk, retained Lebovitz's use of pumpkin seeds instead of Poilane's hazelnuts, and omitted the flax seeds because I didn't have any. I misread the recipe notes that it would be fine to omit seeds or nuts, but later realized that line just referred to the pumpkin seeds. For non-gluten recipes, you need to include a "binder" in doughs which flax seeds often play. I thought about adding in an egg to the dough to serve as the binder, but given that the dough was already rising, decided to leave it as is.
I was pleasantly surprised when the dough rose well, and hoped that maybe the honey acted as a partial binder as one website indicated it may?
Unfortunately, the result out of the oven did not adhere to my cautiously hopeful expectations. The bread was very dense yet flaked apart when cut, and I also found the mild corn flavor to be slightly unpleasant for some reason. It felt like your mouth had to search for flavor with this bread, and when you found it, it was so bland to be disappointing.
Butter did make the bread more palatable though – but not enough for me to freeze the leftovers. At half a loaf, I decided to sacrifice the rest instead of sacrificing my body to consume the remainder. One upside of this bread is that my husband described it as "stodgy" thereby bringing one of our favorite Great British Baking Show sayings home!
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