Alan Davidson

Cornflour

Appears in
Oxford Companion to Food
Oxford Companion to Food

By Alan Davidson

Published 2014

  • About

cornflour is the British, and cornstarch the American, name for a fine starch prepared from maize. It is not the same as cornmeal or maize meal, which are relatively whole flours containing most of the maize grain. Cornflour is made by softening maize in weak acid, grinding it, separating the bran, and washing all non-starchy substances out of the ground meal.

Because cornflour has a very fine texture and contains no gluten it has less tendency to form lumps than ordinary flour. Another advantage is that it has virtually no flavour, whereas the grainy flavour of wheat flour requires some cooking before it goes away. For these reasons cornflour is popular as a thickener in western cooking.