Polenta Prowess - Bachelor's Pantry #55
Alright so we’re going to make Polenta, for me it’s actually easy, it’s quick.
What I have here is I have some chicken stock, I have some cream and some butter, it’s all melted down it’s all boiling right now. So we’re going to add a little bit of black pepper to this, a little bit of salt, I’m stirring that around a little bit. Measurements, you can go by with what’s on the back of this thing, I had probably one cup of chicken stock, a cup and a half of cream and four tablespoons of butter. Pour this right down, right in the middle and as soon as it goes up over the top of the cream just like that, you have a little mount right in the middle that’s when you know you have just enough polenta. You get to really be careful as it starts to boil, it’s going to, it’s like multiple lava, once this starts to thicken up, you don’t want this to splatter around your hands and stuff like that, it’s pretty hot. There are two kinds of Polenta, there’s soft and there’s hard Polenta. The soft Polenta would be that when this comes to the finish product right now it’s still a little creamy so real creamy you need to put that on the plate, that’s really good with flaked lamb, you know you can serve them with chicken and fish and that kind of stuff. The second way is to pour this in the dish, let cool and it hardens. Now you can do a couple different things with hard Polenta, you can dab it with flour, you can deep fry it, you can serve it as an appetizer, you can grill it and serve it with an entrée as it starts; now looks great, it’s nice and smooth, nice and rich because of the butter and the cream in there. You’re going to have that nice, rich texture. Take some fresh garlic grill and parmesan cheese and now that’s ready now cause it’s going to be the last for the flavor. Stir that in so you can get that nice thick cheesy texture. Now you can take this and you can put this right on a plate, put some over it steak, you know some lamb chops or something like that, anything, whatever; tomato sauce is going to go really good with this stuff, you’re doing like a roast it like tomato and chicken or something, breast thrown on the top, hey awesome. So you have this steaming right here, kind of take the pan and you put it out, and take this right in the fridge. Now this stuff cools down really fast, real fast, I mean keep it in a room temperature; it’ll be fine for like 45 minutes to be kind of firm. I’m going to toss it in the fridge until it’s hardened up in 20 minutes or something like that, and now we’re going to take it out and do whatever you want with it.