Kitchen Project #179: Golden Corn & Blackberry Brioche

With TRIPLE corn! Polenta brioche, sweetcorn custard + cornmeal crumb

Hello,

Welcome to today’s edition of Kitchen Projects. Thank you so much for being here.

Today I had a bit of a boomerang with the direction of the newsletter: Where we begin is not exactly where we end. But the ending is good: Triple corn brioche tarts, with a sweetcorn custard cradled by buttery polenta brioche, a cornmeal-enriched crumb and juicy, bright blackberries to contrast.

For KP+, the cornmeal/polenta discoveries continue with a beautiful, airy bread: Polenta Ciabatta (Or is it Cornmeal Focaccia?!) and why bubbly focaccia = ciabatta + dimples + oil. It’s crisp, tender and perfect for summer. Click here for the recipe.

What’s KP+? Well, it’s the level-up version of this newsletter. By joining KP+, you will support the writing and research that goes into the newsletter (including the commissioning - and fair payment - of all the writers), join a growing community, access extra content (inc. the entire archive) and more. Subscribing is easy and only costs £6 per month or £50 for the whole year. Why not give it a go? Come and join the gang!

Love,
Nicola

Corn to be wild

There are some flavour combinations which burrow deeply into your mind and never let go. When I was working at Little Bread Pedlar, a wholesale bakery in South London, my baking hero - and boss at the time - Adam Sellar very casually made the best loaf of bread I’ve ever had. I mean, all the bread he (and we as a baking collective) made was good. But one week, on a whim, he crumbled cooled, cooked polenta into the white sourdough along with finely chopped rosemary.

The resultant loaves, with the classic crisp dark crust and little soft pockets of polenta throughout, are encased in amber in my memory. The bakery, which was located across two big railway arches in Spa Terminus, backed onto several other food businesses. One of these was England Preserves, an excellent jam and chutney company, which happened to be having a particularly bumper year with their apricots. I’m not sure what happened to the apricot crops nine years ago, but we all agreed it was the best apricot jam we’d ever had (I am resentful I didn’t buy as many jars as possible, like a vintage wine), especially when slathered over salty butter (not melted!) on this rosemary polenta bread.

Apricots, rosemary, and corn: a top-tier, holy trinity flavour combination in my book. I’ve already paid tribute to it in a recipe—my sticky apricot, polenta and rosemary cake, which you can find in SIFT and here on KP+. This aromatic, syrupy cake stands apart from others of its kind thanks to a key technique: using blended, cooked polenta as a base (also featured in my blueberry swirl cake. This not only brings a deeper, more rounded corn flavour but also creates an intensely soft and squidgy texture.

While developing the recipe, I realised that cooking cornmeal into batters or doughs is a bit like using mashed potato or tangzhong: it boosts moisture retention and improves texture. But unlike tangzhong, it also adds flavour. Once hydrated and heated, cornmeal turns aromatic and soft, and you can finally taste the corn.

With this in mind, I decided it was time to try out the moisture and flavour boosting benefits of cooked corn in bread. All I could think of is: Polenta-enriched olive oil brioche with rosemary and stuffed with apricot jam. Perhaps it would be a roll that we could build little sandwiches from? OR maybe we’d go fancier and create a kolach-esque brioche tart?

But as it often goes with recipe development, the vision you start with isn’t always the one you end up with. While the apricot, rosemary, and corn trio remains a locked-in combination for the ages, I found myself leaning into something new. Enter: these triple corn brioche tarts with sweetcorn-enriched custard and blackberries. Not what I’d planned, but honestly, better than my original idea.

Over on KP+, I got obsessed with these two words: Polenta Ciabatta (or is it Focaccia?). I mean… doesn’t that sound SO GOOD?! Folding cooked polenta into a high-hydration dough gives you a golden, crisp loaf that can be baked as bubbly focaccia or as ciabatta-style rolls. (my hot take on london focaccia vs ciabatta also expanded in this). No matter what you do, you can’t lose:

What’s in a name?

Despite my lengthy research and investigation into polenta vs. cornmeal back in 2022, I still found myself scratching my head when buying ingredients for this week’s recipe. Faced with bags labelled polenta, cornmeal, corn semolina, express polenta, and coarse corn flour, I left the shop to take a breather. Why is this such an obfuscating area of ingredient taxonomy?

Some suppliers even go so far as to sell the same product under two different names because of this corn-fusion. Which, ironically, only makes it worse.

Though you can read the whole piece here, let me remind you of the key takeaways: Polenta is a dish. Cornmeal is an ingredient. Labelling a bag of cornmeal “polenta” is a bit like calling a bag of oats “porridge.” And for the Italian food scholars among you: It’s true. Polenta isn’t always made from cornmeal. It can be made from buckwheat or other grains, too.

And yet, despite all this, isn’t it odd that in the UK, I rarely hear the word “cornmeal” at all? You can also learn more about cornmeal and the corn-fusion over there in the US from

Bronwen Wyatt

’s excellent cornbread deep dive.

Names aside, cornmeal can be bought in fine, medium, or coarse grinds. It may be yellow or white (the latter mostly found in the American South). The finer the grind, the quicker it cooks — but the less flavour it tends to have. To get around this, manufacturers developed ‘express polenta’: it looks like coarse cornmeal but has been precooked with water, dehydrated, and blitzed into a fine grit. Flip the packet over and you’ll see: pre-cooked maize. For this recipe, you want to pick a golden-hued, medium-grit cornmeal.

Cooking cornmeal

When you cook corn, it undergoes starch gelatinisation: The starches absorb liquid, swell, and soften, transforming it from dry and bland into something creamy, sweet, and rounded. This is similar to what happens when you use cornstarch to thicken pastry cream or make a tangzhong with flour.

As well as transforming the texture, cooking unlocks corn’s natural sugars and deepens its flavour. In the case of cornbread, as in Bronwen Wyatt’s recipe, this all happens during baking. There’s plenty of liquid to hydrate each grain, and provided you use top-quality cornmeal, you’ll be rewarded with excellent corn flavour.

So what about bread-bread? Since corn is gluten-free, adding raw cornmeal to bread dough willy-nilly can be a recipe for disaster. Much like wholegrain flour, the coarse particles behave like tiny razor blades, slicing through those carefully developed gluten strands you’ve worked so hard to build. To circumvent this, cooking the cornmeal turns it into something fragrant, tender, and far less deadly.. It also has the added benefit of adding moisture to your doughs, resulting in a super airy, squishy crumb.

The tests

To see how cooked polenta interacts with dough, I made two side-by-side batches. I wasn’t sure how dramatically the moistened cornmeal would affect hydration—should I count the liquid used to cook the polenta in the effective baker’s percentage (i.e. the water-to-flour ratio)?

The first dough was a classic brioche, swapped to olive oil instead of butter for maximum squish. I cooked the polenta at a 1:5 cornmeal-to-milk ratio, then folded it into the dough with the wet ingredients. The oil was added toward the end, after initial gluten development. On paper, the hydration sat at 72% without including the polenta liquid, but jumped to 104% with it. Sounds like a recipe for soup, right?

In the second dough, I made a super-rich polenta, melting all the recipe’s butter directly into it and seasoning it generously. Here, the hydration was just 40% without the polenta liquid, and 97% with it. Again, potentially risky territory.

Surprisingly, both doughs behaved closer to their “without-polenta-liquid” hydrations. Cooked cornmeal clearly holds onto liquid far more tightly than wheat flour, since a dough with tangzhong at those effective hydration levels would be difficult to work with. That said, both doughs still felt about 10-15% more hydrated than expected, whilst still being manageable to handle.

Once proofed and baked, the same weight of dough made drastically different buns. The buttery polenta dough had a tighter, richer crumb and didn’t rise very much, while the version based on brioche was ultra airy.

The flavours and format

A little enriched dough bun is a wonderful treat. But using enriched dough as a base for a little “tart” is even better - essentially a dinghy of dough filled with delicious things. You can see this in large formats in bakes like Romanian Pasca, or in a smaller size in jam-stuffed kolaches. It is breakfast Danish adjacent, but instead of a yeasted flaky pastry, it uses brioche. I’ve experimented with this shape before - a chocolate custard and frangipane stuffed chocolate brioche was one of my proudest development moments. During my book tour in LA, we made a version of the pumpkin brioche with roasted pumpkin and salsa verde.

As you know from reading the intro of the piece, I started by pursuing an olive oil, polenta and rosemary flavour scheme. These made delicious buns, and I particularly enjoyed a manchego little sandwich with apricot preserves - but they fell short in the brioche tart format. I was envisioning some kind of tangy cream cheese custard in the base to complement the savoury dough, with plenty of apricot preserves on top. But in practice, the combination fell short. It just didn’t flow.

At this point, I knew I wasn’t going to force the rosemary/apricot flavour scheme into a format that didn’t suit it. But I wasn’t ready to abandon corn. It was back to the drawing board.

So, what do you do when you’re not sure? DOUBLE DOWN!!! Earlier this year, I had my first foray with using sweetcorn in baking in the format of these canele-adjacent corn tarts. And since brambles, or blackberries, are ripening all across the country - handily on my daily walk route - I couldn’t imagine a happier marriage. Finally, since butter and corn are besties, it felt right to enrich the dough with butter, rather than olive oil.

Custard ratios

One of the most important things to balance when developing a custard recipe is the ratio of eggs to dairy. Eggs, which contain proteins that coagulate when heated, are responsible for setting the custard. The more eggs you have, the firmer the set. Considering the ratio between eggs and dairy is crucial to achieve the desired set. For crème anglaise, aka pouring custard, the egg to dairy is about 1:8. In the case of custard tart, a much firmer, denser and richer wobble of a custard, it is 1:3. In Basque cheesecake (yes, cheesecake is a custard!), it is approximately a 1:4 ratio. My quiche custard is closer to 1:1.5.

The cooking method matters too. Custard Tart, for example, can handle a high egg-to-cream ratio because it’s baked at a low temperature, which helps avoid curdling. So what of my brioche tarts? A small piece of brioche cooks in just 12-14 minutes on a relatively high heat, so I needed a custard ratio that was compatible with that cook time, ideally avoiding curdling. I mixed up three tests: 15%, 25% and 35% eggs to dairy. This was also pre-blackberry pivot, so I was also testing out various jam/topping combinations to compare and contrast:

In such a shallow tart, I found the 25% eggs to dairy custard performed well. It had a nice, clean set, but still wobbled slightly after 14 minutes in the oven! It sets to a perfect, creamy base. Don't be scared to take your buns out of the oven and give them a wobble/check the browning.

The finishing touches

Although this tart with fresh blackberries in the base, sweetcorn custard and that soft, airy polenta dough was already beautiful, I couldn’t help but wonder… wouldn’t a crumb be REALLY nice? I think crumbs are a cheat code in the baking world. They take about 20 seconds to prep (team melted butter method every time!) and they add so much character and flavour. This one with cornmeal is delightfully gritty - in a good way, y’all, don’t freak out! - and looks beautiful scattered on the egg-washed bun.

The final bun does look nice on its own, or with a few extra blackberries on top. But I fell hard for the versions with a spoonful of jam on top, too. It harks back to the kolach ancestors and gives an overall juiciness. You can make your own (I have written out the recipe for blackberry jam, which I’ll put in the comments as this is far too long already) or use good-quality shop-bought. Both work well!

Alright, let’s make it.

RECIPE: Golden Corn & Blackberry Brioche

Makes about 10-11 buns

Ingredients

Cornmeal-enriched brioche

Cornmeal base

• 30g Cornmeal (medium grit is good. I used this)

• 100g Milk

• Pinch of salt

Dough

• 100g Cooked polenta, from above

• 120g Whole milk

• 1 Egg, about 50g

• 250g Strong Bread Flour

• 15g Honey

• 20g Caster sugar

• 4g Instant yeast

• 5g Fine sea salt

• 60g Butter, soft

Sweetcorn Cream

• 225g Double cream

• 75g Whole milk

• 225g Fresh corn kernels

Sweetcorn Custard

• 230g Sweetcorn cream from above

• 50g Whole Egg

• 70g Caster sugar

• Pinch of salt

Cornmeal Crumb

• 40g Caster sugar

• 70g Plain flour

• 50g Cornmeal (medium grit is good. I used this)

• Pinch of salt

• 60g Butter, melted

Plus: a punnet of blackberries, good quality shop-bought blackberry or blackcurrant jam (recipe to make your own in the comments)

Method

• For the brioche, start by cooking the cornmeal base. Bring the milk to the boil in a small saucepan, then add the cornmeal and salt. Stir continuously until thickened and boiling, then boil for a further minute to ensure it is very thick and can pretty much hold its own weight. Pour straight into your stand mixer bowl and leave to cool for 10-15 minutes.

• Add the milk on top of the cooked polenta and mix briefly to break it up slightly. Add the egg, followed by all the other ingredients except the butter. Mix on medium-high speed with the dough hook for about 8 minutes or until you reach medium gluten development. This is when the dough can be stretched a little, but it tears quite easily.

• With the mixer running on medium-low speed, add the butter around 1 tbsp at a time until completely combined (wait until each piece has been incorporated before adding the next bit), then turn the speed up to medium-high and mix for a further 8 minutes.

• Check the gluten development - it should be fully developed. This is when you can pull the dough thin to a windowpane, and it does not break easily. If your dough isn’t quite there yet, continue mixing for another 3 minutes and check. Once the gluten is developed - the dough is shiny and stretchy - move it into a clean container and proof at room temperature, covered, until roughly doubled. Knock the air out of the dough, recover then place in the fridge overnight (or if you are doing same day, you can pop in the fridge or freezer til it is firm enough to roll)

• For the sweetcorn custard, bring the cream, milk and sweetcorn kernels to a boil in a saucepan over a medium heat. As soon as it boils, bring it down to a low heat and simmer gently for 10 minutes. Turn off the heat and leave to cool for about 30mins - 1 hour before blending. Blitz, either in a blender or using a hand blender until smooth, then pass through a sieve to catch the fibres. If you want your custard to be super smooth, you can pass several times, though I think once is enough. Reserve in the fridge until ready to mix.

• For the crumb, weigh the cornmeal, flour, sugar and salt into a bowl and give it a stir to mix. Melt the butter, then pour it over the dry ingredients and stir until small clumps form. If not used immediately, transfer to a clean container to store. This can be made in advance and kept in the fridge for 5 days or the freezer for 3 months.

• For the buns, transfer the dough onto a floured surface and divide into 50-55g portions. Shape these roughly into round balls, then leave to rest for 5 minutes. To finish the shaping, use the natural curve of your hand to roll the balls into a tight round shape, using a circular motion. Transfer these onto baking trays lined with paper, leaving plenty of space between, then with a floured palm, flatten the balls into discs. Leave to proof until very puffy and doubled in size, about 1 - 1.5 hr, roughly doubled, depending on your kitchen.

• Pre-heat the oven to 170c fan.

• To finish the custard, whisk 230g of the sweetcorn cream with the egg, salt and sugar in a jug (hand blender also works) and set aside.

• To shape the buns, take a small bowl (ensure it's smaller than the diameter of the bun). I used my Tala pudding mould). You can use grease spray, or a thin coating of vegetable oil. You can also use your hands if you don’t have an appropriate squishing vessel.

• Press the mould directly into the centre of the bun, creating a doughnut-like shape. You need to press quite hard, and you can rotate the mould around a bit to get the best shape. You may need to repeat a few times if the dough springs back, but persevere. Just try not to squash the edges. You can help further expand the hole in the middle using your hands - grease them a little! Leave to relax for 10 mins, then come back and help spread them out a little more if they’ve sprung back

  

• Egg wash the whole bun, focusing on the edges. Halve 10 blackberries and place them in the cavities, then pour the sweetcorn custard in. Top with the corn crumble, focusing on the edges.

• Bake for about 13-14 minutes, until golden and risen. The custard may have bubbled in places. That’s okay! Leave the buns to cool on a cooling rack.

• Finish the buns with a spoonful of jam, if using, and two blackberry halves, artfully placed. Once topped, these should be eaten immediately. Though best eaten the same day, you can store leftovers in the fridge and bring them to room temperature before enjoying for a couple of days if necessary.