LOS ANGELES — One afternoon, as I was preparing a Southern meal for friends coming over for dinner, I realized I had forgotten to make the cornbread. But since I keep all the ingredients on hand at all times, I knew I wouldn’t have a problem quickly baking a round. However, as I searched through my pantry, I saw that I had no cornmeal left, but in its place on the shelf, a lone bag of masa harina. “Corn for corn,” I thought and decided to use it to make my cornbread.
The recipe — my grandmother’s, which I have made countless times in my life — made with masa harina produced a cornbread that was distinctly different from what I was used to but was equally delicious. It had a much more pronounced corn flavor and was softer. It was one of those small experiments that turned out to be a much bigger deal in hindsight — the happenstance of its creation opened my mind to what cornbread could be.
Masa harina in cornbread isn’t new, but it’s still not as common as I think it should be. But to understand the ingredient’s brilliance in this application, we first must define what it is and isn’t. Typically, the cornmeal you and I buy in grocery stores is made with dried corn that is ground to varying degrees of coarseness. It is usually made with dent corn, a variety of “field corn” that is covered in a hard starch exterior covering a soft starch center. (Polenta, a coarse ground cornmeal, is made with flint corn, which is mostly hard starch throughout.)
Masa harina, however, is made by first soaking the corn kernels in an alkaline solution like slaked lime or lye, which dissolves the hard outer shell and leaves behind the soft starch center. This center is then ground fine and dried to produce the masa harina. The soaking step makes the corn more easily digestible but it also has the added benefit of making the corn taste more, well, corny.