Summerfest 2010- Corn

Welcome to Summerfest 2010, a multi-blog celebration of all the most wonderful produce of the summer. For more information on Summerfest and how to participate,  click here.




I live in Chicago, where we usually have but two seasons, Arctic Winter and Construction. However, the Construction season has a small break which we refer to as Sweet Corn season.

Thanks to Worldcommunitycookbook.org for the pic.

My family is pretty serious about our sweet corn. We don’t get tempted by shiny ears in the grocery stores, no matter how organic or luscious they look. And god forbid someone suggest something from the canned section! Nope, in my family it is Stade’s or nuthin’.

Stade’s is the farmstand five minutes from The Farm, our family getaway, and their sweet corn is completely addictive. Everything else is a disappointment. Usually, it needs nothing but a sprinkle of salt, maybe a slight slick of butter. My Mom can take down three ears in as many minutes. We wait for the big sign to go up that “Sweet Corn is Here” and it’s all corn all the time till the season is over. We bring it to people as gifts. We eat it cold right out of the fridge.



My personal stupid human trick is on display from July-August, since my method for eating corn on the cob is both ridiculous and genius. I eat one row at a time, with laserlike precision, leaving a cob so perfectly stripped it looks like a machine has been involved. Or maybe a raccoon. This is the result of having braces for the better part of five years, during which time corn on the cob was supposed to be a no-no. But cutting corn off the cob, while fine for certain recipes, just doesn’t exactly say freewheeling summer BBQ. So I taught myself to gently lever the kernels out with my lower teeth intact, preventing any braces-related incidents and also leaving me entirely without corn stuck between my teeth. When the braces came off, I waiting for Sweet Corn Season, and liberally buttered and salted my first ear. And I bit, with wild braceless abandon. And I hated it. I felt corn juice squirt out the sides of my mouth and onto my cheeks, I got butter all over my chin, and little bits of kernel got stuck in between each and every tooth in my face. Ick. So I went back to my weird and slightly OCD corn habit, much to the horror of my mother.



In honor of corn season, despite the fact that the single best way to enjoy it is simply right off the cob, I thought I would share some of my favorite corn dishes!



Caramelized Corn with Fresh Mint



Kernels cut from 10 ears of corn
3 tablespoon unsalted butter
6 tablespoons minced fresh mint
Salt


In a wide skillet, melt the butter over high heat. Add the corn and cook, stirring often, until golden and browned (kernels may begin to pop), about 10 minutes. Stir in the mint and sprinkle with salt. Transfer to a serving bowl and serve while hot.

Thanks to purplefoodie.com for the pic!

Corn and Bacon Soufflé


1/2 pound sliced bacon
6 tablespoons butter
1/4 cup freshly grated sharp cheddar cheese
1 medium onion, finely chopped
2 T chopped chives
1 T chopped parsley
1 1/2 cups whole corn kernels
3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
2 cups half and half, heated
6 large eggs
Salt and cayenne pepper to taste


In a large skillet, fry the bacon over moderate heat till crisp on paper towels, and crumble. Pour off all but about 1 tablespoon of fat from the skillet. Grease the bottom and sides of a 1 1/2-quart soufflé or baking dish with 1 tablespoon of the butter, coat the surfaces with half the grated cheese, and set aside.


Add 2 tablespoons of the butter to the skillet and melt over moderate heat. Add the onion and corn, stir for 3 minutes, and set aside.


In a saucepan, melt the remaining 3 tablespoons of the butter over low heat, add the flour, and whisk till golden, 2 to 3 minutes. Remove pan from the heat, add the milk, and whisk till thickened and smooth. Cool the mixture slightly, then whisk in the eggs one at a time till well blended. Add the corn mixture, bacon, salt and pepper, chives and parsley, and cayenne and blend thoroughly. Scrape the mixture into the prepared soufflé dish, sprinkle the remaining cheese over the top, and bake till golden brown, 30 to 35 minutes. Serve hot.




Chilled Corn Soup with Mace


4 cobs fresh corn, cleaned and kernels removed
3 ½ c chicken broth
1 c half and half
1 t canola oil
½ c shallots, minced
½ t grated mace
1 T minced chives


Boil cobs with broth and milk for 5 minutes. Discard cobs. Saute shallots in oil over medium low heat until very soft, then add corn kernels and mace. Sweat for 5 more minutes over medium heat. Add broth, a pinch of sugar, and a pinch of cayenne (optional) and simmer for 20 minutes. Let cool and blend until smooth. Strain if you desire a very smooth soup Serve cold with sprinkle of chives and pinch of nutmeg and a swirl of crème fraiche (if desired).

Thanks to amysafternoonreading.blogspot.com for the pic!

Sweet Corn Cupcakes with Brown Butter Honey Ginger Frosting


For the frosting:
10 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into chunks
1 teaspoon honey
1 t brown sugar
½ teaspoon vanilla extract
1/8 teaspoon salt
1 cup confectioners’ sugar
½ t ground ginger


For the cupcakes:
¼ cup unsalted butter
Reserved butter solids, leftover from browning the butter for the frosting
¼ cup sugar
¼ cup brown sugar
1 large egg
¼ cup sour cream or Greek yogurt
1 ½ c corn kernels
½ c white chocolate chips (optional)
1 ¼ cup cake flour
¼ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon baking powder


Browning the butter: Place 10 T of butter in a heavy-bottomed sauce pan and heat over medium-high flame. Swirl the pan occasionally to melt butter completely. Place a fine mesh strainer inside a heat-proof bowl; keep within easy reach of the stovetop. Continuing to heat, butter will foam and begin to brown around the edges. Watch yourself, as this may splatter and butter burns are icky. When butter solids have turned a uniform mahogany brown, remove the pan from the heat and immediately pour butter through strainer, separating all but the finest bits of solid from the butter fat. Set strainer lined with butter solids aside. Place butter in the refrigerator to set while preparing cake batter.


For the cupcakes: Preheat oven to 350°F. Line 12 standard cupcake tins with paper liners.


In a mixing bowl, combine ¼ c butter with the reserved butter solids and the brown and regular sugars. Beat with an electric mixer until light and fluffy, scraping down the bowl occasionally. Add egg and beat until light well combined.


In a blender or food processor, purée sour cream with 1 c of corn until smooth.


Combine flour, salt, baking soda and baking powder, and whisk to blend. Add about 1/3 of the flour to the butter and egg mixture and mix to incorporate. Mix in half of the corn purée. Add half of the remaining flour and mix just to incorporate. Add remaining corn purée. Mix in remainder of flour and stir to incorporate. Fold in the rest of the corn kernels and the white chocolate chips. Spoon the batter evenly among the cupcake papers.


Bake cupcakes until set, 15 to 17 minutes. Remove cupcakes from pan to cooling rack while preparing frosting.


For the frosting: Combine cooled brown butter with brown sugar, ginger, confectioners’ sugar and salt. Beat with mixer until light and fluffy, scraping down occasionally. Add honey and vanilla, and mix to thoroughly incorporate. Frost cupcakes and store in an airtight container.

thanks to cupcakestakethecake.com for the pic!

For the rest of the best Corn recipes from Summerfest, check out these great foodie sites:

This Week’s Corn Links

What are your favorite corn recipes?


Yours in Good Taste,


The Polymath






■Nicole at Pinch My Salt: Creamed Corn with Bacon and Rosemary

■Margaret at A Way to Garden: Vintage corn Americana slideshow, and no-frills creamed corn

■The FN Dish: Creamed Corn-Off: Battle of the Southern Cooks

■Alison at Food2: Freezing Corn

■Toby at Healthy Eats: Candied Corn and 4 other recipes

■Michelle at Cooking Channel: Browsing Corn Porn

■Judy/Tuscan Diva: Fried Polenta Crostini with Porcini Ragu

■Jennifer of Gilded Fork: Corn: Sweet Versatility (history, uses & recipes from cocktails to cornbread

■Chef Mark: Gettin’ Corny! (Musings from childhood, tips & fresh-corn recipes)

■Caron of SanDiegoFoodstuff: Chino Corn Risotto with Chanterelles and Burrata

■Caroline at The Wright Recipes: Pickled Corn with Summer Onion and Basil

■White on Rice Couple: BBQ Chicken and Corn Pizza

■Shauna at Gluten Free Girl: a sweet corn risotto (and how to make corn stock with husks and mirepoix)

■Tigress in a Jam: Cream Corn Scones (the perfect way to use up left over roasted or boiled corn):

■Alana at Eating from the Ground Up: Corn on the Kabob (invented by her artist husband):

■Cate O’Malley at Sweetnicks: Corn and Spinach Stuffed Portobello Mushroom Caps

■Kelly at Just a Taste: Caramel Corn

Sad Secret Shameful Confessions

Its time for me to come clean about my most deep and personal shame.

For a foodie, there is a lot of food that I don’t eat. A list the existence of which I hate to acknowledge, a list of things widely touted as so delectable that people think of them as the pinnacle of perfection. And I’m not allergic to anything, and I don’t have political agendas against how the foods are attained or prepared, and I’m not restricted by religious beliefs.

I just don’t like ‘em.

Now, I don’t think you need to be Andrew Zimmern to effectively fit yourself into the foodie category, I know plenty of serious chefs and gourmands who aren’t going to tuck into insects and four year old putrefied shark. But despite having once eaten two live termites (a story for another day), my issue isn’t with extreme eating. It’s with stuff that most people find delicious, and I’m always afraid of that moment with someone who doesn’t know me when I have to tell them the stuff I don’t eat.

It would be like having to tell someone that, while you happily acknowledge your sex addiction, you aren’t interested in S&M, porn, toys, erotica, threesomes, and will only do half of the positions in the Kama Sutra. Your street cred would suffer significantly.

Same for me. I swear that I’m a foodie, I have over 70 herbs and spices stocked in my cabinets. I have Korean black garlic and Mugolio in my pantry. I have equipment and gadgets galore (but, as a true foodie, rely most on a set of a few basic tools to work magic in my kitchen). I am prepared, by virtue of a good stock of staples, to make a hearty delicious meal at the drop of a hat. I believe in making homemade stock, in using top notch ingredients prepared to best heighten their natural goodness, and that good food made with your heart is one of the truest forms of love. I subscribe to eight cooking magazines. I collect cookbooks and read them like novels. And the two guys I would most like to go on a road trip with are Anthony Bourdain and Michael Ruhlman. But as much as I want to be the Batgirl in that trio, I fear that I would be woefully unprepared. Because an essential part of the food experience that those two enjoy the most is stuff that, quite frankly, would make me ralph.

And which is worse, the embarrassment of having to tell them the stuff I don’t eat, to admit out loud to two of my greatest culinary heroes that, not to put too fine a point on it, I can’t hang….that is too much to bear.

I don’t feel overly bad about the offal thing, after all, variety meats seem to be the one area that people can get a pass on. With the possible exception of foie, which I wish like heckfire I liked, but I simply cannot get behind it, and nothing is worse than the look on a fellow foodie’s face when you pass on the pâté.

Here, in general terms and no particular order, is the list of stuff I just can’t get it up for:

Offal or variety meats (liver in all forms, any organs, blood, tongues, black sausages, haggis, headcheese, feet, ears, snouts etc.)

Blue or overly stinky cheeses. And I really wish people would stop telling me that they "have a blue so mild it will change my mind." It will not. It will make me want to barf in my purse. And while I love the ooey gooey goodness of brie and camembert and other soft-ripened beauties, I am one of those annoying people who either cuts off the white rind, or scoops the middles out. I know. I'm the bane of your cheese tray.

Raw tomatoes or tomato juice (love them cooked in every possible application), ditto raw onions of every variety (pickled is fine, and I cannot get enough of them cooked)

I find avocados to have an unpleasant mushy mouth feel and taste weirdly like bland oil to me, so I pass on the guac. Okra is too slickery to consider. Beets used to make me gag in every preparation except thinly sliced and fried into chips...something about them makes me think of sweet dirt, but I haverecently become a convert to baby beets, preferably roasted and I definitely like the chiogga and golden ones better than the dark purple ones. Eggplant is also on the list, the only exclusion to the ban being my own ratatouille galette, where the japanese eggplants are sliced so paper thin and shingled with zucchini, yellow squash, and plum tomatoes so that they are barely noticeable, and tempura,which tastes mostly of fried anyway.

Shellfish, including oysters, mussels, clams, crabs, shrimp and lobsters (with the exception of squid, scallops and octopus, and very occasionally the deep fried versions of above)

“Fishy” fish, including salmon (I know, a Jew who hates Lox, its ridiculous), cobia, swordfish etc. I like all the firm white-fleshed fishies like halibut, cod, grouper, sea bass, snapper, etc. I like tuna out of a can, packed in oil, or cooked to medium, but can’t abide it raw or rare, so I never order it out, since I know that asking a chef to cook it through is an insult to both chef and fish. Actually can’t really abide any fish rare or raw, and I think seaweed tastes the way those little cans of fish food flakes smells, so despite wishing like mad to love sushi, I tend to be a tempura/udon/teriyaki kind of girl. (I am, however, open in this area and hope one day to find the right person to gently guide me in finding stuff I would like…I’ll keep you posted on the Great Sushi Search)

Peppers. Sweet or hot. Green, red, yellow, white, purple, orange. Roasted or raw. Ick. If I accidentally eat them raw I burp them up for days, and cooked they smell to me like old armpit.  Of all of them, I can occasionally stomach some red pepper, I even use a bit in my confetti rice salad, but I still sort of eat around it.

Eggs with distinct white/yolk separation….scrambled, in quiche, frittatas, and in omelettes is fantastic, but soft boiled, hard boiled, fried, over easy, poached, coddled…not so much. Makes it difficult when everybody and their brother is topping every damn dish with something poached or soft-boiled these days.

Overly peaty mushrooms. I like a chanterelle, oyster, enoki, hen of the woods…but anything with real pungent mushroomy flavor puts me off. So anytime that flavor is concentrated, mushroom soups for example, deep powerful yuucchh. Shockingly, one of the appetizers I often serve to great acclaim is one I invented but cannot eat....fresh portobellos with the gills removed, stuffed with pate and cut like a tiny pizza, glazed with cabernet jelly and garnished with sage. I hear it is fantastic.

Spicy isn’t so much a preference as a physical necessity. In addition to my chronic and severe gastric reflux, I also have no gallbladder. (TMI?) When my gallbladder and I divorced several years ago, it got custody of anything spicier than my own fairly mild chili, my friend Doug’s sesame noodles, and that plastic Velveeta-Ro-Tel dip that I probably shouldn’t admit to liking. I’m allowed very occasional visitation rights, but only at my own risk.  I am also a total sice wuss, ex-gallbladder or no, so stuff that you think is not spicy at all blows the top of my head off.

Black Pepper. I find it acrid and burnt tasting and would love to kneecap the guy who decided that every dish served to one in a restaurant ought to come with the offer of freshly ground pepper from something the size of a Louisville Slugger. I season with salt, herbs and spices, and instead of pepper I use Grains of Paradise, which I adore as much as I dislike BP.

I KNOW.

It’s mortifying.

I continue to taste these things (except for the offal, I just have given up) periodically, just to be sure. And when I am lucky enough to be somewhere exceptional (Alinea, Charlie Trotter's , The French Laundry et al) for a tasting menu, I do just that, I taste. And while I can often say in those places “That wasn’t so awful for ________.”, the experiences just don’t convert me. They are the exception that proves the rule.

I had a scientifically-inclined buddy who said that the people who think cilantro tastes like soap (oh, yeah, that’s on the list too…) actually have a certain salivary enzyme that other people don’t have. He also noted that a huge percentage of the stuff I don’t like seems to have a certain minerality taste in common, especially the offal/mushroom/strong cheese families, and that perhaps it is that which puts me off.

I’d love for it to have a medically-defined causality, then maybe the boys would forgive me and let me hold the bat-maps and pack the bat-snacks. Especially since we are all fans of pork rinds. Oh to just be able to say to someone, with the same simplicity as saying one keeps Kosher or is vegetarian...I'm sorry, I have ________. No long explanations, no embarrassment. I wonder what we could call it? I’ve been blaming my terrible sense of direction on a Magnetite deficiency for years….maybe I have Gastronomitis?

There is plenty that I do eat, of course, my tush is a testament to that. And enough off the beaten path stuff that I can hopefully at least avoid philistine status. I love game meats, squab and quail and pheasant and venison, yum. Ostrich, delish. For my tenth birthday I requested duck with cherry sauce. I keep duck fat in my freezer, along with three kinds of bacon. But I fear that my condition still might keep me from my Batgirl cape.

I will say to AB and MR…there are some really excellent qualities I bring to the table. I love a good cocktail and a nice wine pairing, but can’t drink to excess anymore (see aforementioned reflux/gallbladder issue) so you’ll always have a designated driver, and I promise to be careful with the Batmobile. And with me not eating a lot of the stuff you like best, there will be more for you! I’m a great sous, tell a good dirty joke, love football, and I’m not high maintenance. Plus I live in Chicago, one of the alltime great food towns and a good jumping off point for any adventure.

Surely that at least should get me a Batgirl audition, no?

Your turn…what don’t you eat that you hate to admit to?