What Can I Do With Maize-Meal?

What can I do with maize-meal?  Well, that's a good question!

Dom from Belleau Kitchen challenged us this month to rummage in our kitchen cupboards for a poor forgotten or neglected ingredient and to make something with it.

Well, believe me, I have many items I could have chosen for this challenge.  The one I chose, though, was the bag of maize meal.  A friend had picked it up for me when I had been struggling to get hold of polenta at one point thinking it might do a similar job.  I had managed to find polenta by this time, though, and so the maize meal has languished on my shelf.

I didn't think it would be difficult to find recipes to use it up - my old friend Google always comes up trumps.  And, it did again this time. I got lots of links to South African blogs or recipes and thought I had lots to choose from.  Unfortunately, though, when I started to read the recipes in more detail I kept finding glaring omissions.  Ingredients not listed in the ingredients lists kept popping up in the methods with no information to quantities.  In fact, this seeming mistake seemed to happen so many times from different sources that I am now wondering if recipes are written differently in South Africa.  Can anyone enlighten me?  Am I supposed to have some basic knowledge and assume that if a recipe doesn't list eggs or rising agents or sometimes completely different ingredients, they are there anyway and I should know how much to add?

Anyway, undeterred I thought I would use the titles of the recipes but just make up my own ingredients and methods and so I did.

First up is maize meal porridge.

This was okay and did me my breakfast for a couple of days.  However, I wasn't excited about it and prefer my nice Scottish oat porridge so I won't be making this again.  I decided to add cocoa powder to make a chocolatey version as the maize-meal has a pretty cardboardy taste on its own and I served it with bananas and cold milk.

Here's the recipe to serve 2 with big portions or 4 with small portions.  I recommend small portions!

Ingredients - 

80g maize-meal

1 tbsp cocoa powder

1 tbsp light brown muscovado

2 tsp cinnamon

650mls water

pinch salt

Method - 

Pop all the ingredients into a large saucepan, mix well.  Simmer, stirring occasionally for about 20 minutes.

As an aside to this post, I can recommend a tastier porridge.  While making Dan Lepard's Rye Apple cake, I kept eating the uncooked batter and thinking it was like a lovely spiced rye porridge so I decided to look and see if there were any recipes for porridge made with rye flour. I found this recipe for whipped berry rye porridge from Scandi Foodie.  It was lovely and obviously very healthy. 

So, moving on from breakfast to a main meal, I decided my next project would be for maize-meal pancakes.  This is based on recipes I found for fried maize-meal bread which seems to be served as an accompaniment to stews.  We were having Tinned Tomatoes' Jacqueline's braised lentils for tea and these actually went very well with it. The lentils dish was lovely - very comforting and satisfying - I recommend it and will be having it again. Another great way to get loads of fibre into the kids.  We also had some leftover meatballs so we served those alongside - sorry Jacqueline. 

Here's the recipe for the pancakes - 

Ingredients - 

120g maize-meal

120g plain flour (or what I did was 60g plain and 60g spelt flour just to keep the fibre levels up a bit more)

1 tsp baking powder

pinch of salt

2 eggs, beaten

250ml milk

2tsp oil

Method - 

Beat together all the ingredients. Grease a frying pan with a little oil and heat over a moderate heat.  Drop tablespoons of batter onto the pan when hot.  Fry for about 1 minute or until bubbles form on the surface then flip over and fry the other side.  Serve warm with a comforting stew.

And now onto my final maize-meal recipe for pudding.  These are wee chocolate puddings and are inspired by a recipe from Shona's Kitchen - a blog with lots of South African recipes. They have a prune in the middle of each cake which gave me a bit of a double whammy as it used up a tin of prunes I found in the cupboard too.  And prunes are good for fibre - am I preaching too much? I served these with custard but I appear to have forgotten to photograph them when served so here they are still in the tin.

My recipe here - 

Ingredients - 

230g maize-meal 

1 tsp baking powder

2 tsp cinnamon

115g caster sugar

2 tbsp cocoa powder

1tsp vanilla extract

500ml single cream

250ml milk

12 prunes

Method - 

1. Preheat oven to 180C.

2. Mix together all the ingredients except prunes and combine well.

3. Pour mixture into 12 muffin cases.

4. Add a prune to each one.

5. Bake for 30 mins until set.

6. Serve hot with custard. 

And yes, I finished the whole bag of maize-meal with these three recipes. I am unlikely to buy it again but if I ever find myself with some, I'm going to go with the pancakes as my favourite way of using it up.  I would be fascinated to hear if anyone else has any maize-meal recipes - please let me know in the comments.