Broa de milho is a dense bread that has a characteristic cracked top and a mildly sweet taste. It’s great on its own with a dollop of butter, but its crumbs are also used in several savoury recipes such as the classic Bacalhau com Broa.
If you’ve experienced a traditional Portuguese restaurant before, your meal probably started with bread, butter, olives, and a type of pâté. That’s what the Portuguese call couvert, an assortment of appetizers to nibble on while you decide what you want to order. Our favourite part of it is always the small basket of bread, usually made of two or three types of sliced homemade bread.
Typically, a crusty white bread, a seeded one, and a cornbread called broa de milho or just broa in the local language. It’s a unique bread that perhaps impossible to find outside of Portugal and some of its former colonies. The good news is that it’s super simple to recreate at home, and it will make you feel like a professional baker!
Our Broa de Milho Recipe
The key ingredient in this recipe is maize flour, preferably the yellow type, so your bread has the characteristic pale-yellow colour of the broa. In Portugal it’s called farinha de milho (corn flour) and there are different types that are classified based on how coarse they are. The best type for making broa is the 175, that comes in yellow or white. The type 70, which is the easiest to find in supermarkets and grocery stores, is also suitable, but absorbs more liquid so you might need to adjust the amount of water.
This classification is specific to Portugal, so we recommend using a medium coarse yellow maize flour. For some places, corn flour can mean the same as corn starch, but that’s not appropriate for this type of bread. The remaining ingredients are straightforward, strong bread flour, salt, water, sugar, and dry active yeast.
This bread is a no knead bread, that means you only have to combine the ingredients, and place it somewhere warm to rise. It’s the perfect bread to have alongside rich red meat dishes, but it also goes well with soups, such as the Portuguese Caldo Verde.
How to Make Portuguese Corn Bread
Broa de Milho – How to Make Portuguese Corn Bread
8
servings1
hour30
minutes45
minutes238
kcalBroa de milho is a dense bread that has a characteristic cracked top and a mildly sweet taste.
Ingredients
- Ingredients for the Starter (Sponge)
100 g Wheat Flour
5 g Instant Yeast
60 ml Lukewarm Water
- Ingredients for the Dough
320 g Corn Flour
320 ml Boiling Water
60 g Wheat Flour
40 g Sugar
10 g Fine Salt
30 ml Room Temperature Water
Directions
- To prepare the base of the dough, add the corn flour to a large mixing bowl, then pour on top the boiling water, mix well. Let it cool of for about 30 minutes while you prepare the sponge.
- To a different mixing bowl, add the sponge ingredients, mix well to combine. Cover with a damp cloth and place it in a warm part of the house, let it rise for 30 minutes too.
- Combine the sponge and the dough base, add the remaining dough ingredients. Stir well with your hands or a stand mixer.
- Cover the dough with a damp cloth, let it rise for 1 hour.
- Preheat your oven at 250 °C. Our oven takes about 30 minutes to fully heat, that will vary from oven to oven.
- Dust a separate bowl with flour, transfer your dough to it. Hold the bowl firmly, use circular motions to spin the dough in the bowl. While the dough spins, it hits the sides of the bowl, turning into a ball.
- Place a sheet of parchment paper on a baking tray, place your dough on top. Use a brush to brush off excessive flour from the dough. Bake it for approximately 45 minutes until the top is golden. To check if the bread is baked properly, hold it, and give it a knock at the bottom of the bread, it should sound like knocking on wood.
- Place the loaf on top of a cooling rack, allow it to cool off completely before slicing it.
Have you tried this recipe? Let us know in the comments and don’t forget to leave a rating!
