The 3 Types Of Cornmeal You Should Know Before Shopping

Buttery yellow kernels of corn account for a number of foods we consume every day. The vegetable (sometimes classified as a grain, or even a fruit) is in everything from corn syrup in sweets, crushed corn in whiskey, to one of our personal favorites, cornmeal. The ingredient adds a sweet, earthy flavor to any dessert, but before you just grab any kind, you need to know the difference between the three main types of cornmeal.

Cornmeal is often the foundation of a delicious treat, but if a recipe is unclear which kind of cornmeal you should buy, you may end up with blue cornbread or white corn muffins. Yellow, blue, and white cornmeal all serve various purposes, but they're produced in a similar way. Cornmeal comes from drying out corn kernels and crushing them down with a grindstone or steel roller. The machine you use to process the kernels partly determines the texture of the meal, which is why you'll see coarse, medium, and fine grains dotting the grocery store aisle.

A grindstone typically yields roughly-textured cornmeal while a steel roller gives it a smoother and finer texture. However, you can always produce cornmeal with your desired texture using a blender, seed grinder, or coffee grinder. Whether you make it on your own or spring for the store-bought type, make sure to read ahead to know the difference between yellow, blue, and white cornmeal.

As the most common type of cornmeal, yellow cornmeal is what you'll most likely reach for when a recipe requests the ingredient. Whenever you're making a corn-forward dish, such as old-fashioned hot water cornbread, go with the yellow kind. It tastes similar to the vegetable, infusing every dish with its classically sweet taste.

Its pronounced flavor isn't the only reason yellow cornmeal is the most popular kind. The ingredient is easy to find in several textures, giving you more room to experiment with its flavor in different recipes. Coarsely-ground cornmeal adds the most texture, making it the best candidate for finishing off a dish. It gives fried catfish bites a delicious crunch and makes the topping on blueberry cobbler or crumble a little richer.

Medium-ground yellow cornmeal has a slightly softer feel, but it still produces a distinctive texture. It's the best choice for fluffy foods that still need a bit of grit. You can also use it in waffle or pancake batter to bulk it up with a more interesting structure. Finely-ground cornmeal gives you all the bold flavor without any of the roughness. This soft kind is best for giving desserts like cornmeal cake, muffins, or pie crust an earthy taste without altering the texture.

Though there's only a subtle difference between white and yellow corn, white cornmeal does stand apart from the yellow kind. It has a much softer taste, making it the best choice for savory dishes, like tacos with corn tortillas. Its taste is the most subtle of the three colors, but it can still be used in traditional corn dishes. If you're of the belief that cornbread shouldn't be sweet, make it out of white cornmeal like many Southerners do.

Because the flavor isn't bold, white cornmeal allows other ingredients to share center stage. It's the top choice for Jamaican cornmeal porridge, which doubles down on the nuttiness of white cornmeal with coconut milk, cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice. It's also great added to desserts like pound cake, lending it an earthier taste without overtaking the classic flavor.

Most white cornmeal products tend to be more finely ground than yellow cornmeal (try classic Indian Head stoneground cornmeal), which is why it's so common in pillowy foods like tortillas or cakes. However, some brands do make coarse and medium-ground white cornmeal, so you can give foods a nice grit without it being a dominating presence.

Aside from the indigo-tinged tortilla chips that you can find in the grocery store, blue cornmeal products aren't very common. The ingredient is derived from Hopi maize, a blue and purple-bespeckled corn. It's cultivated and eaten by the Hopi tribe, as well as other indigenous people across the Southwestern United States and Mexico. Though it's not as popular outside of the region, blue cornmeal is definitely a Native American food you should try at least once.

It's the sweetest out of the three cornmeals and its intense, earthy flavor stands out in dishes, so it's the best choice if you really want to mirror the depth of a true corn flavor. Blue cornmeal tends to have the finest texture of the three, so it works as a great choice for baking. If you're not too concerned with highlighting other flavors in a dish, the ingredient makes nutty, robust pancakes, waffles, tortillas, cornbread, and muffins.

Finely-ground blue cornmeal is the most prominent texture, but there are some stone-ground varieties out there that produce cornmeal that's a little more coarse. It's a little more difficult to source, so you may need to turn to the internet, where you can get many brands, such as this Marsh Hen Mill Sea Island blue cornmeal, that's organic and claims to have a floral flavor. You can use the coarser blue cornmeal to add grit to cornbread and muffins, to fry fish and chicken, or for whipping up some blue-tinged hushpuppies.