November 14, 2014 - 2:38pm
What do you do with blue cornmeal - other than singing the blues?
Answer: Bake a cornmeal bread of a different color, a la the Wizard of Oz's horses of a different color. Strange eating a bread that looks purple, but tastes very nice indeed. The recipe is adjusted from Hamelman's Bread for sourdough starter instead of commercial yeast. Mostly the same otherwise, well, except for the color.
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Forgot to include the blue cornmeal recipe and how it came to be that blue cornmeal ended up in the house. It's the Car Talk theory of domestic chores.
Recipe link for blue bread. Actually, more purple than blue.
purple! Dang cameras and computer colour palettes! Got another un-purple crumb you can park next to it?
Good shape to it and it rose beautifully round.
Mind you, I have never tasted piki, but have always wanted to. It is a traditional Hopi bread made with blue cornmeal and and some kind of alkali (slaked lime comes to mind).
It is cooked on a flat stone that is heated in fire and greased with sheep's brains. A glob of dough is daubed on and immediately pulled off, so a thin layer adheres adheres to the hot stone. This is repeated all over the stone in overlapping layers to form one large sheet that resembles parchment (except it's blue). Then it's rolled up like a scroll.
Janet
Coming from a place called Sheepshead Bay (in Brooklyn, NY) and because I am a pretty-much vegetarian, my curiosity is nil about any recipe with sheep's brain as an ingredient. But what you (Janet) describe sounds like a bread version of old-fashioned apricot roll up candy. It comes in other flavors as well now, but it does not look as good as it used to. Perhaps I have lost my attraction to brightly-colored food products. Even without the sheep ingredient, this recipe seems a bit challenging.
Mini Oven, As usual you voiced a thought more brilliant than my own. I should make the purple bread again just to take a photo of it next to a more conventionally-colored bread (whether brown or white). The bread dough looked definitely purple and the baked bread somewhat less so. The blueberry/blue cornmeal muffins are another story. The batter was a deep purple and a dark purple when baked. Office colleagues managed to eat them anyway.