25% maize meal bread

There is a post from the long distant past (2017) on this site, by Wendy (Lazy Loafer) describing one of her bread tasting open house experiments where different sourdough loaves were made each with a different flour making up 25% of the flour. It was a lovely, interesting read, and a lovely interesting experiment too, especially since the flours used were quite varied and there were some non-wheat variants including amaranth, and one made with whole corn flour, which ended up being the clear winner in terms of tasting.

Quite inspiring and hence this loaf!

In the past I have made loaves with maize meal, but always made a porridge/scald first with the maize meal. Which I suppose is the 'correct' way, but also wasn't hassle free in that the porridge tended to lump and was difficult to incorporate in the final dough.

This bread was much simpler to make, simply by incorporating the maize meal as a dry ingredient with the other flours. The dough was gritty when mixing, and it didn't slump even though the hydration was a little higher than Wendy's. The grittiness didn't really come through to the crumb of the final loaf, although you could feel a slight grit in the crust.

In terms of the experience of eating the bread it was similar to eating a maize meal porridge (or as we call it here, mielie pap or uphuthu). Very filling (satiating), fairly bland to the taste, made lovely toast, and overall 'substantial' is a word I'd use to describe.

The maize meal used is a South African maize meal, which in these parts is always made with white maize and I'd say is 'medium' ground - not as coarse as the polenta that I have access to which is made with yellow maize, and certainly not as fine as corn starch! So, I guess you'd have a completely different experience if you used a yellow maize meal.