How To Make Polenta

Polenta makes a luscious bed for anything from quickly sautéed mushrooms to a hearty slow-cooked meat ragu. It also goes well with oven-roasted tomatoes and zucchini. However, somewhere in its past, polenta picked up a reputation for fussiness. I am here to tell you that it is anything but fussy. This weeknight-friendly recipe helps you whip up a pot of creamy polenta in about 30 minutes. I’ll also let you know exactly when to stir it to make sure the sides aren’t drying out. Ready? Here’s how to do it.

Once upon a time, it was thought that polenta needed to be stirred and stirred and stirred as it cooked. You can try this method if you need an upper body workout, but I find the cover-and-forget-it approach much easier to handle on a weeknight. This is a method most famously espoused by Marcella Hazan, and I’ve adopted it wholeheartedly. Here’s your game plan:

1. Get the polenta going by whisking coarse-ground polenta or yellow cornmeal into boiling water and stirring until it gets thick.
2. Cover the pot and let the polenta cook while you go about making the rest of dinner. Every 10 minutes or so, uncover the pot and give it a good stir to make sure it’s cooking evenly and the sides aren’t drying out.
3. Thirty to forty minutes later, your polenta is ready for the table.

A note about timing: A tense moment might come around the 15-minute mark. At this point, the polenta looks done. And indeed, if you taste it here and like it, by all means serve it! But if you let it cook for a little longer, you’ll find that the polenta tastes sweeter and more deeply corn-like, and any last lingering grittiness from the ground corn smooths away. I love it at 30 minutes, but go a little longer if you have time or want a thicker polenta.

For creamy polenta, the classic ratio is: 4 cups water : 1 cup polenta or yellow cornmeal. Memorize it and in no time you’ll be doubling, halving, or tripling this recipe like a pro.

Any leftover polenta will set into a solid block as it cools. You can actually cut it at this point (say, for dinner the next night) and grill it, roast it in the oven, or deep-fry it. If you’re really craving creamy polenta again, you can warm the leftovers with some water or milk, and stir until it becomes soft again. You can make some creamy polenta with some mushroom ragu. Or, since you now know how easy it is, you can just make yourself another batch.