Work In Progress: Gluten Free CornCakes

I’ve been obsessed with fresh corn throughout this summer, I have these food obsessions from time to time.  It has coincided with my discovery that you can microwave fresh corn in its husks in just 3 minutes or if already peeled on a plate with clingfilm.  This gives me the time to throw a salad together while I wait for the corn to cool down enough to handle and add it.   I suspect with the continuous rain we’ve had lately our home grown corn won’t go beyond this week, but no matter, just like the frozen pea it’s a great frozen product.  By the way if you have access to your own field of sweetcorn where the time between picking and cooking is so short preserving all of its natural sweetness, you are one lucky person.

In all of this time I’ve been eating sweetcorn I have been thinking about what to do with it but nothing ever materialised until now because…well you see I just couldn’t stop eating it long enough to play around with it.  Sweetcorn cakes is something I tried out years ago but instead of making a recipe with the normal wheat flour as most recipes out there contain, I wanted to make them gluten free.  I think I wanted a challenge, and that’s certainly what I’ve ended up with here.  I tried out two batches, one using cornmeal also known as polenta (in this case it was fine instant polenta flour) and the other using rice flour.  I left the recipe quite basic and didn’t jazz it up with spices and chilli because I wanted to taste the  difference the two flours were going to produce, this would be harder to detect if the cakes were disguised with lots of additional flavours.

I had a logical reason to make the cakes with fine polenta because to my way of thinking I was hoping it would emphasize the corn taste not detract from it.  For the other batch I chose the brown rice flour because that’s what I had to hand…I buy this kind of stuff with no idea what I’m going to make out them and then at times like this looking through my overstocked cupboards…bingo!

The result of these two batches were that Bikerboy preferred the rice flour ones and enjoyed eating them but I wasn’t as happy with them as he.   At the same time I wasn’t all that excited about the the polenta flour ones either.

Conclusion on the Polenta Flour CornCakes
They had a superb colour from the enhancement of the polenta, loved the sunny colour it produced but the texture wasn’t quite right.  Even using the fine instant polenta they still had too much of that gritty cornmeal texture which in the cakes I don’t care for.  Bikerboy tried them first and thought they were quite nice, and by all means try it if rough texture is something you enjoy.  To this batch I used spring onions along with the herbs and eggs.

Conclusion on the Brown Rice Flour CornCakes
The texture in these was more the result I was after but I could detect the rice flour taste coming through and for me that took away from the corn taste. Bikerboy had no such detection and thought they were great.  There you have it, two different tastebuds tasting the same thing in different ways.  With these corncakes I used red onion instead of the spring onions.

My next step is to try  one using chickpea flour (Gram flour), since I bought a bad of the stuff months ago and still haven’t done anything with it, and the other batch not using any flour at all.  I need to leave a little gap now until the next corncake session as I’m all corncake out….!

The pattern in the core of the fresh corn reminds me of a beehive.

I’ve given the recipe below and it’s there for anyone to change the choice of herbs, add chilli or a teaspoon of spice.  I was thinking about choosing dill next time instead of coriander or parsley.  I wanted some of the corn to be broken down in the processor along with the other ingredients and some held back to be folded in for texture.

Gluten Free CornCakes

450 grms  /  3 cups of corn, between 2-3 fresh corn cobs
100 grms /  1  1/2 cups  spring onion (scallion) or red onion, roughly chopped
100 grms /  1 cup of rice flour OR fine polenta flour
2 eggs
a large handful of fresh herbs like parsley, coriander, basil, dill or a mixture
chilies – optional

Flavourless oil like sunflower for frying the cakes

Add two thirds of the corn and onions and the rest of the ingredients into the food processor and whizz for a minute, then fold in the remainder of the corn and onion.

Pour a couple tablespoons of oil and when hot add a spoonful of the mixture to the hot oil.  Leave it frying for at least a minute to minute and a half before trying to turn it over.

CornCakes with the Fine Polenta Flour

CornCakes with Rice Flour

Try and not to turn them over until the sides start to look stiff.

The inside of the polenta flour corncakes, lovely and golden yellow, though the texture was a little too gritty for me.

The inside of the rice flour corncakes, not such a great colour better texture, the rice flour was a little too strong coming through but Bikerboy enjoyed them.

Tweet

Related posts: