Determining how finely the cornmeal is ground can be difficult, since one company's coarse grind may be identical to another company's medium. In general, I found that cornmeal with a texture more akin to sugar than table salt delivered the best results. After failing to make any headway by playing around with the ingredients, I began experimenting with alternative cooking techniques. I followed a number of recipes in microwave cookbooks and made polenta that ranged from passable to inedible. Even when made with enough water, microwave polenta will never become a fluffy, corny mound, and is not recommended.
Pressure cookers combine the worst of all worlds.
The only thing you eliminate by using a pressure cooker is the stirring, but you make up for that with scouring time after dinner. The nontraditional method I prefer uses a double- boiler and requires only occasional stirring. I think this is because the constant stirring of the traditional method breaks up some of the starch balloons and makes the mixture pastier. Much of the flavor comes from the bonding of proteins and sugars in the cornmeal. The longer polenta cooks, the more time there is for these elements to come together and to increase the sweetness and rich corn flavor of the polenta.