You’ll find Baking products under the Italissima brand!

These include a variety of ready-to-cook Polenta products as well as a variety of other baking products to suit your needs.

Make your own with Italissima ingredients, or buy ready to go; the quality is always superb.

Polenta has a creamy texture due to the gelatinization of starch in the grain. However, it may not be completely homogeneous if a coarse grind or hard grain such as flint corn is used.

Historically, polenta was served as a peasant food in North America and Europe. In the 1940s and 1950s, polenta was often eaten with salted anchovy or herring, sometimes topped with sauces. 

 Polenta is cooked by simmering in a water-based liquid, with other ingredients or eaten with them once cooked. Polenta is known to be a native dish of and to have originated from Friuli. Boiled polenta may be left to set, then baked, grilled or fried; leftover polenta may be used this way. In the nearby Trieste, it is eaten with a cuttle fish and tomato broth in the Venetian tradition, with sausage following Austrian influence or with cooked plums, following an ancient recipe. Some Lombard polenta dishes are polenta taragna (which includes buckwheat flour), polenta uncia, polenta concia, polenta e gorgonzola, and missultin e polenta; all are cooked with various cheeses and butter, except the last one, which is cooked with fish from Lake Como. It can also be cooked with porcini mushrooms, rapini, or other vegetables or meats.

The variety of cereal used is usually yellow maize, but buckwheat, white maize, or mixtures thereof may be used. Coarse grinds make a firm, coarse polenta; finer grinds make a creamy, soft polenta.

Italissima is proud to offer a variety of Condiments including a number of mustards and hummus products.

Make a good dish great with premium quality condiments from Italissima Foods. Italissima Foods makes a vast array of Condimenti – Condiments including chutneys, spreads, mustards, salad dressings, and pastes (tahini, halva, etc.). Pair one of the high-end spreads with a sharp cheese, make a grainy Dijon mustard crusted chicken, or enjoy a salad with one of the fine salad dressings from Italissima.

Italian mostarda is fruit preserved in syrup that gains quite a kick from a healthy jolt of powdered mustard seed, and is one of the standard condiments served with boiled meats in northern Italy (see the ultimate boiled dinner, fit for a king).

Though you’ll find it from Piemonte on through the Veneto and down into Emilia Romagna, the best known variation is that from Cremona (Mostarda di Cremona), which is also produced commercially. According to Italian food scholar Antonio Piccinardi, the word mostarda derives from the French moustarde, which in turn derives from mout ardent, fiery must, which was made by adding powdered mustard seed to unfermented grape must and cooking it down to produce an invigorating condiment.