Arepas are flatbreads made of corn flour. Just corn flour, water, salt, and maybe some butter or oil. Take a few ounces of dough and flatten it into a pancake, fry to brown, and bake to cook the inside. VERY populat in Colombia, Venezuela and Panama. I like these, but they come out rather dense, likely because the corn flour has no gluten, and there is no leavening added. I've tried adding baking soda, but they're still dense. Kind of bastardized arepas. Would like them to be a little fluffier. Anyone know how to do that?
Cornflour is a term that can have different meanings in different countries.
In the UK it means Cornstarch, In the US it is Corn Flour which would be Cornmeal in the UK. And while polenta is ground corn it is different to cornflour/meal.
Marisa Harina is corn flour/meal which has been cooked in limewater first.
So as you can see when it comes to terminology things can get confusing.
After a quick google search Arepas are made with a type of cornmeal called "Masarepa". It is made by soaking dried white or yellow corn to remove the germ. It is then cooked and ground into a fine wet meal and shaped into Arepas.
So just using any cornmeal might not produce the same results.
The corn (aka maize) product used for arepas is in fact flour ground from pre-cooked corn, as Abe related. It is not the same product as masa harina. It isn't cornmeal as the term is used in the US, which is much coarser than a flour and not pre-cooked before grinding. The best-known brand of masarepa used for arepas is P.A.N.
I've made arepas but have never been satisfied. For one thing, my interiors tend to be gummy instead of fluffy, even when I finish them in the oven. For another, I've never had "real" arepas made by someone who actually knows how, so I don't quite know what the target should be.
Here is a link about arepas:
https://arepasdelgringo.com/mastering-the-arepa-how-to-make-arepas/
TomP
Yes, that recipe adds cheese to the mix, and those might understandably puff up as a result. But those are bastardized arepas.
I wasn't using cornmeal. Cornmeal won't work. I WAS using real corn flour that was packaged specifically for arepas.
Start with a lower to low gluten content. Breads from this area usually use a low gluten flour - you should try to match them for similar results. Enjoy!
Corn flour has NO GLUTEN. So lowering the gluten isn't possible. In any case, if you want to leaven, whyever would you want to lower the gluten content? It's the gluten that holds the bubbles that the leavening produces.
In my experience, dense is just the way arepas are. They also often have a cheese filling.
Yes, I think that may be the case. In which case there really isn't ANY way to leaven them. But if you want to split them to fill them, they can't be too thin. Thin ones won't puff up.
I have been able to split thin ones but it takes a lot of care and the result is fragile. Maybe I've simply been making them too thin all along.
For what it's worth, ChatGPT said not to knead the dough too much or it would get dense. I've always added water while kneading until the dough doesn't crack when pinched. After a rest I might need to add a little more if a pinch cracks again.
Since masarepa is new to me, I did a little noodling around and came across this blog about it.
Paul
Fried bread was a treat growing up. For my parents It was maybe the only food they had for the day, during WW2 in Italian internment camp. The indigenous American people called it the bread of sorrows.
Disclaimer, these are wheat flour breads.