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Make cornmeal from popping corn

Cornmeal Pancakes and Corncakes Made From Popping Corn

Short on cornmeal? Grinding up extra popping corn is an easy and frugal way to create cornmeal that tastes fresh and delicious. Of courses, if you have medium grind cornmeal, you need not grind popcorn!

Author Fran Costigan

Ingredients

  • ½ frozen banana- mine was pulled out of the freezer at the last minute and allowed to thaw while the cornmeal soaked.
  • 3 ounces scant ½ cup popping corn ground to flour or use the scant half cup of coarse cornmeal
  • ½ cup just-boiled water more as needed to make a pourable batter.
  • 1 tablespoon of vegan butter or use oil, or leave it out
  • 1 tbsp maple syrup Grade A dark, or use agave, date or sorghum syrup or granulated sweetener
  • 3 tbsp oat flour more as needed (I make my own in the Vitamix from rolled oats)
  • or use rice barley, or even coconut flour
  • ¼ teaspoon baking powder
  • 1/8 teaspoon salt

Instructions

  1. Pour the cornmeal into a medium bowl. Add the butter if using and pour the boiled water over. Stir and soak for 5 minutes. Add the sweetener of your choice.

  2. Add the oat (or other flour), the baking powder and salt and mix to a loose batter.
  3. Mash the defrosted banana with a fork and mix it into the batter.
  4. Add more flour as needed to get a pourable batter.
  5. Either make pancakes (you need to fry these in an oiled pan) or little corncakes (no oil)

For Pancakes

  1. Heat a griddle or cast iron or other heavy bottom pan and add enough neutral vegetable oil, or refined coconut oil to coat the bottom.

  2. When the pan is hot, stir the batter and add pour 1 tablespoon per pancake into the pan. Cook a few minutes until you see bubbles and flip to cook the other side. These take only a few minutes.

  3. Optional: add a few pieces of chocolate or chips to the hot pancakes.

For little corncakes:

  1. Drop 1 tablespoon of batter into silicone cupcake bakers set on a baking sheet.

  2. Bake 5- 6 minutes, or until a wooden toothpick removes almost clean. The tops will be cracked and still pale.

  3. Set on a cooling rack. Silicon stays very hot so be careful.
  4. After cooling for a few minutes, nudge the cakes with an offset out of the bakers.

  5. Eat warm or at room temperature, plain or with vegan butter, jam, nut butter.

Recipe Notes

I admit to eating almost of these over the course of a day. They were so tasty. I froze the last 2 little corncakes.

This morning, as I was writing up the recipe, I heated the the frozen corncakes or 15 seconds in my microwave and they tasted just as good as the freshly made ones.

The last of the pancakes was smeared thickly with peanut butter and chocolate.