cornflour

Cornflour here is the milled starch of Zea mays. Two recipes use it, for different jobs. The Gazan sayadiya mixes 8 g into 35 g of flour for dredging mullet, which then rests 5 to 10 minutes before frying. The jameed-free mansaf whisks in 30 g (about 4 tbsp) with yogurt, ayran, an egg and salt in a large pot off the heat, and the recipe credits the egg and the cornflour with stabilising the laban so it never splits. Its one rule is to stir without stopping until the sauce boils.

The Journal says more about what cornflour is not than about what it does. In its note on Japanese curry, roux cooked from three wheat flours and from cornflour to six temperatures browned only in the wheat-flour case, which places the colour in the Maillard reaction between the flour's protein and its sugars. The note on gluten adds that wheat flour contains no gluten until water and work make it, and it uses maize starch in its gluten-free doughs: with maize starch, hydroxypropyl methylcellulose gave a soft crumb, and zein, the storage protein of maize, was mixed with it into a dough at 40 degrees.