I’ve tried to make this a couple of times. Once I tried to bake it and tonight I tried to pan fry it per the instructions. Failed miserably.
Anyone have any polenta secrets?
go to that www.food cite and put polenta in and see if there are any helpful secrets there. 
My mother makes this all the time, and she’s a very basic cook, so it can’t be that hard. What we need to know is…at what point in the process are you having difficulty? Are you making your polenta from scratch, from a mix, or is it already prepared and you’re just trying to heat and eat? What’s the recipe you are using?
Yep. A bit more info is needed here. Some specifics, if you please.
I don’t know if this is a trick or not it’s just how I learned to make it. I guess you know all the stuff about pouring it in to the stock in a fine stream while constantly stirring and then constantly stirring while it cooks. I learned that it doesn’t need constant stirring if you don’t let it boil - if it starts to, take it off the heat and put the lid on for a minute or two, then give it a stir and put it back on the heat. Doing this increases the cooking time a lot but turns out really creamy polenta. The cooking time also varies a lot from brand to brand.
For baked, grilled or fried polenta the key seems to be how much cheese/butter was used (slightly more is better and recipes with two or three cheeses even better) and how well chilled it is before you cut it up. Some recipes say to cool it only but it is easier to deal with if well refrigerated.
I use a microwave, and a recipe similar to this.
Rather than stir the stuff as that recipe calls for, once it gets a good boil on, I turn the power down to 10-20%, just enough for a bit of bubbling, and let it cook undisturbed for 20 min. A slightly askew lid works as well as the wax paper Cooks suggests.
You can make it in smaller individual bowls too. Add some vanilla or maple syrup before cooking, and you get a tasty desert.
It’s cheating, but there is an alternative. Sometimes, in the refrigerated section of grocery stores near the breakfast meats… often near the scrapple, there is also tubed and prepared cornmeal mush. Bob Evans used to make it, don’t know if it they still do, or not. Anyways, it is polenta, for all practical purposes…ready to be cut into slices and fried or grilled. Serve the slices with a nice mushroom ragout or even some pesto.
Had to step out for a while…
… Anyhoo. I bought the packaged kind mentioned above. It wasn’t moldable as I thought. I tried slicing it but it didn’t seem to ‘fry’ when I pan fried it (and it stuck to the pan something awful even though I used plenty of olive oil).
What started this was a dish I got at a local restaurant. Little polenta ‘cakes’ with kale and mushrooms. How hard could that be, I thought. Right.
Maybe I should start from scratch. I’m not looking for something exotic, I just like the taste of polenta.
This recipe has always worked for me:
http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/recipes/recipe/0,1977,FOOD_9936_26402,00.html
Not a straw you fool! Use a spoon! A spoon!
[sub]It was funnier in my head[/sub]
If I get what you’re saying. . .
you bought one of those “polenta logs” and then tried to slice & fry to get that crust?
Well, I’ve never done that, but if I were, then
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I’d use vegetable oil, not olive oil.
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Get the oil very hot before putting in the polenta.
If you’re “sticking” you probably didn’t get the oil hot enough. You can’t get olive oil as hot as vegetable oil. If you want OO flavor, I’d fry it in vegetable oil, then drizzle some OO on it.
Anyway, polenta is pretty damn easy anyway. It’s basically water and cornmeal. I’ll actually use a sifter to put it into the water. It wants to clump if you don’t get it in in a fine stream. Then, I use my “accusimmer” burner. This is a low-heat burner. You want to do polenta basically as low as your stove top allows.
It’s an overlooked starch. It’s great with grilled meats and vegetables, or even a saucy shrimp dish. And, great with eggs the next morning.
I’ve wondered about this for a long time, since cornmeal mush is about a third the price of the identical-looking pre-made polenta. Of course, you only seem to be able to buy cornmeal mush in the Midwest, not in New England. But sometimes I get a hankering for fried cornmeal mush and wondered if I could substitute the polenta for it.
Well, on second thought, I’m going to try it and report back at some point.
Having grown up with my mom’s Kentucky-style corn meal mush and also made and bought polenta myself, I would say that they are not quite the same. Mush is generally made with white cornmeal and will have a softer texture and less “corny” taste than the polenta. However, you might not mind the difference.