Homemade Biscuits recipes: Polenta biscuits
Posted on Jun 6, 2009 09:55:25 AM
This biscuit recipe is a special one. Polenta flour is nothing but cornmeal, cook it and you’ll have polenta, which is a classic peasant dish from Northern Italy (more of that in future posts).
I baked these polenta biscuits for my colleagues last week (it was my birthday), along with some classic chocolate chip cookies. An interesting social experiment about people and food came out. As I ran out of butter for the cookies, I had to halve the quantity. When I started to walk around the floor with a big container with many polenta biscuits and very few cookies, everybody went for the ones they were more familiar with, that is the cookies, even if they had to twist their fingers to pick them up without touching the others. As a result, cookies finished very soon, and this opened the road to the polenta biscuits. Needless to say they were very well received.
This is not a classic Italian recipe, in fact it’s taken from one of the first Jamie Oliver’s books, The Return of the Naked Chef, (click here for .co.uk) but hey, polenta flour is like a flag, it makes something Italian. Needless to say, they’re perfect for breakfast, along with these other breakfast biscuits and cakes
- 170g (6 oz) butter
- 170g (6 oz) sugar
- 255g (9 oz) polenta flour
- 100g (3 ¾ oz) plain flour
- zest of 2-3 oranges, finely chopped
- 2 large eggs
Put the sugar and the sifted flours together, then rub in the butter. The method should be the same as for the shortcrust pastry in the fruit tart: use cold butter and make sure you rub it in the flour as quick as possible. But in this case you won’t have to roll the mixture out, so feel free to soften the butter in the microwave and stick the mixture in the fridge before baking it.
Once the butter is mixed, add the orange zest and the eggs. Put it in the fridge until it’s firm (from 30 minutes to one hour), then spoon small teaspoons of the mixture on the oven rack covered with parchment paper, and bake in the preheated oven at 190°C (375° F) for 5-7 minutes until the edges are brownish.
Let the biscuits cool completely before serving.
Polenta biscuits
More cakes, and more Jamie Oliver’s recipes.