Apollonia Poilâne’s Savory Corn Flour Bread Recipe

Corn flour bread is cornbread made with corn flour instead of a mix of flour and yellow cornmeal. Third-generation baker Apollonia Poilâne challenged herself to create this original, dairy-free recipe after attending several weekend roasts while at Harvard.

“I realized a lot of [recipes] called for half corn flour, half wheat flour,” she says. “This was a challenge because corn flour doesn’t have any gluten in it. And because it doesn’t have gluten, it doesn’t rise. . . The solution for me was flax seeds and oat milk. The combination of both [creates] this bind that keeps the dough together.”

Corn flour is a fine powder made by grinding dried corn kernels (maize). Corn flour is naturally gluten-free, which means baked goods featuring corn flour won't produce the same rise as those made with wheat flour, but they will be tender and full of corn flavor.

Corn flour comes from finely ground corn kernels. Most corn flour is from dried yellow dent corn, a variety with a small dent in the top of the kernel. Millers remove the tough outer hull and nutritious germ from whole corn kernels, then use metal rollers to grind the kernels into a fine powder. Stone-ground, whole-grain corn flour is rarer. It contains more nutrients and fiber, but it has a shorter shelf life.

While Apollonia Poilâne began working on corn flour bread as a college student, it took her years to refine her recipe. Here are a few tips from the baker to help you make corn flour bread:

1. 1. Try different corn flours. While her recipe uses yellow corn, Apollonia encourages trying different types of corn flour. “We used yellow corn here, but there is such a wealth and variety of corn flours and corn flour colors,” she says. “If you have blue corn, if you have white corn, you should absolutely use those. The visual cues won't be the same in terms of colorings, but you can adjust easily to this.”
2. 2. Add hazelnuts. Apollonia’s recipe includes hazelnuts because they have a strong scent. “And they can bring up the flavors of the cornbread, especially as you toast a slice,” Apollonia says. “If you’re allergic to hazelnuts, you can replace them [with] almonds, walnuts, pecans, or forget them altogether. But the thing here is the hazelnuts [add] to the flavor profile, and that’s what I like about it.”
3. 3. Use oil instead of butter. When you grease your tin mold, opt for cooking oil, such as sunflower oil or rapeseed oil. “You can use butter as a substitute,” she says. “I would recommend the oil because this bread tends to be a little sticky, so the oil actually works better than the butter, which might create a little bit of a crust.”
4. 4. Mix well. Appolonia’s recipe mixes a variety of textures, making it necessary to incorporate them well. “The trick here is just to make sure that the coarser textures don’t fool you into thinking that it’s properly mixed when it actually isn’t,” Appolonia says.

Wrap your corn flour bread in a cloth or place it in a paper bag and store it at room temperature. This bread will keep for about two or three days.

“This bread, as it goes old, tends to mold,” Apollonia says. “That’s just because of the lingering humidity. So try to eat it within the next two, three days of baking. Don’t try and keep it that much longer. After the second day, toast it to have those corn notes to it.”