Masarepa is the special precooked corn flour that is used to make corn corn flour recipes called arepas, a staple food in Venezuela and Colombia. Marian Blazes is a freelance writer and recipe developer with a passion for South American food. She wrote a cookbook focusing on the cuisine of Brazil.
Learn what foods you need to stock your pantry with to cook Colombian recipes. Masarepa is a convenience product, a modern arepa-maker’s dream, as this ingredient takes a lot of the labor out of the process of making arepas. A food most closely associated with Venezuela and Colombia, arepas used to be made by soaking dried corn and then manually pounding the grains to remove the seed germ and the outer lining. Fortunately, the labor-intensive process for making masarepa is now done on an industrial level. Most grocery stores carry dried precooked corn flour that can be used for making arepas quickly and easily.
Masarepa is combined with just a few ingredients to make a dough that’s easy to work with. Sometimes two ingredients are commonly confused, and for those who are new to South American cooking, it’s not unusual to conflate masarepa and masa harina. Masarepa is corn dough that is dried and ground into fine cornmeal and can be found in Latin food specialty stores and online. It is softer and more refined and the taste is starchier than masa harina. Masa harina, on the other hand, is made from corn treated with lye in a process called nixtamalization in order to remove the germ and outer lining before it is ground. This ingredient is used to make arepas, which are an extremely versatile food and can be served as appetizers, snacks, or side dishes.
Masarepa has a corn taste, but it’s milder than a tortilla. When made into arepas, its most common use, it’s typically griddled like a pancake and becomes crisp on the outside and soft in the middle. Masarepa is the flour of choice for arepas, some baked goods, and empanadas, deep-fried turnovers filled with meat, veggies, or cheese. Depending on the dish you’ll be serving them with, arepas can be grilled, baked or deep-fried.
They’re almost always prepared with masarepa, but some varieties call for hominy or even quinoa. You can find arepa flour pretty easily in specialty stores that cater to Latin food and online. This product is also sometimes called masa al instante and harina precocida. Masarepa is a pantry item that does not require refrigeration.
It can keep for months in a cool, dark place. Get daily tips and expert advice to help you take your cooking skills to the next level. Assign a randomly-generated, eight character, alpha-numeric value to this property. Before discussing the best substitutes for corn flour, we need to get into what, exactly, is meant by this term.
If you see corn flour called for in a recipe, your first step should be to determine whether that recipe originated in the United States or the United Kingdom. Ireland, Israel, and possibly several other countries, corn flour is used to refer to something that we, in the U. Confusingly enough, what we call corn flour, they call cornmeal. Corn flour, as we know it in this country, is a type of flour made by grinding whole corn kernels into a yellow powder.