Polenta Power
In the Chelsea Market, on 9th Ave., there's an Italian goods store that features rows upon rows of imported treasures from Italy. There you'll find salt-packed anchovies, genuine San Marzano tomatoes, even white truffles for several hundred dollars a pop. Every time I go in there, I marvel at the goods and then I leave empty-handed: I never know what to buy.
Recently, though, I was determined to buy something. I toured around the store and there, in the back corner near the meat counter, I spotted it: real, Italian polenta. When I say "real" polenta I mean not instant polenta. Everywhere else I've ever bought polenta--Key Foods, Whole Foods, Union Market--only sells instant. I wanted to experience the real deal, the kind that cooks for 45 minutes. And so I left the Italian goods store with not one but two packs of genuine Italian polenta.
I wish now to describe to you the difference between instant polenta and "real polenta." If this were the SATs, it would go something like this:
1. Instant polenta is to regular polenta as...
(a) Care Bears are to polar bears;
(b) sitting in a massage chair at the Sharper Image is to spending a week at an Arizona spa;
(c) table for 1 at the IHOP is to table for 20 at The French Laundry.
(d) All of the Above.
The answer is D and if you haven't yet made REAL polenta at home you get a D in my book. It's such a shocking thing--it's so much creamier, sultrier, sexier than instant polenta, I feel like a polenta virgin who just spent a night with Sofia Loren in a bordello. What? I don't know. Polenta power!
So the dish you see above is polenta for breakfast. It comes from Lidia Bastiniach's book "Lidia's Family Table" and it's as hardy a breakfast as you could want, especially as the weather gets colder. You cook the polenta for 40 minutes with 5 cups water to 1 cup polenta and a pinch of salt, plus a few bay leaves. Lidia has you stream the polenta into the water when it's cold, whisking all the way, and then turn on the heat--I'm not sure what that does, but it certainly produced excellent polenta. You must stir as it goes--every few minutes or so--or it'll stick.
Once it's cooked through, you add a cup or two of grated Parmesan (yum!) and half a stick of butter (double yum!) And here's the real smacker (smacker? Adam what kind of word is smacker?): once in the bowl, put an egg yolk on top and the residual heat will cook it. Grate over more cheese, some pepper too and you have a breakfast of champions. Italian champions. Like Rocky---cue Rocky music.
If you want polenta for dinner, do as Alice Waters says to do in her new book "The Art of Simple Food." Get a baking dish, layer in polenta, tomato sauce, fresh mozarella, and Parmesan and make a polenta lasagna. Bake in the oven til golden brown on top, like here except this didn't get really gold:
But what a dinner. Diana came over that night (remember Diana? She was my old roommate) and all three of us dug in with abandon. It was messy--it was hard to make pretty on the plate--but it was oh so good.
And so, I hope I have convinced you of the power of polenta. Real polenta, not that mamby pamby instant kind. If you're going to make polenta, make the real thing. It's worth it.
