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.)
