What is cornmeal?

[leopold]

Here in Mexico we have a corn flour that we use for making tortillas .would that be about the same as cornmeal ?
and on the subject of flour:I have not looked really hard but so far I have only found general purpose flour although the last I bought was extra fine and it sure is nicer to work with.
 leo

[Pete-zza]

leopold,

I think you may have masa harina in mind, which is dried corn that has been treated with an alkali, such as lye, to remove the hulls, and then dried and ground into flour. Cornmeal is ground from dried maize (corn).

When I have looked for flours in Mexico at the retail level, all I found in the supermarkets was all-purpose flour and whole wheat flour. I once gave a local Mexican baker a small bag of 00 flour and he said he had never seen or heard of it before. He also confirmed that there were very few choices of flour in Mexico. One of our Mexican members, jeancarlo, a pizza operator in El Grullo, has said much the same. Maybe in the larger cities, other flours are available through wholesalers and importers.

Peter

[leopold]

Thanks a lot Peter!
in my hometown ( gomez Palacio , Mexico ) we have a SAM'S CLUB .next time I am home I will see if they carry a better flour than gp( although I am getting decent results with GP )
Pete I have read about punching down the dough after the rising period , but I just take it out of the bowl and extend it into a  beautiful crust , am I commiting a capital sin here? The pizzas actually come out good and I do not have such a hard time stretching the dough.
a couple of my last pizzas tasted a bit bitter , any idea why?
allrighty then,
leo
 

[Pete-zza]

leo,

When I have been in Mexico (in the Puerto Vallarta area) and in the stores, including Sam's and WalMex and even some of the other large hypermart stores, I have not seen anything but all-purpose and whole wheat flours.

With respect to punching down the dough, I tend to do it only for same-day doughs. That helps redistribute the yeast in the dough to new sources of food (sugar from decomposition of the starch), and lets new gases form. But if you are going to punch down the dough, I think it is best to allow enough time for the dough to recover from the punchdown/reshaping. Otherwise it can be quite elastic and hard to shape without the dough springing back. For dough balls that are to be cold fermented in the refrigerator, I tend not to punch them down at all, although no particular harm is likely to come to them were I to do so. In many cases, the dough hardly rises at all so there is almost nothing to really punch down. The way I do it is essentially the way that professionals make their dough. In their case, with hundreds of dough balls sitting in dough boxes or trays, it would be difficult and time consuming for workers to go around punching them down and waiting for them to rise again before using.

Peter