In spite of the drought our sweet corn ‘patch’ (about 3/4’s of an acre) has done well this year. I’ve frozen 15 pounds or so, family and friends have frozen lots, and we’ve given lots away for eating. We’ve eaten it boiled with butter and salt, grilled with mayonnaise, chili powder, and parmesan cheese, and made corn soup. I’m not tired of it yet, but I am casting about for different things to do with corn.
Recently on NPR I heard a feature about using the trimmings from vegetables; making ginger syrup from ginger peelings and so on. Sounded interesting, so I looked it up on-line and that led me to the Gilt Taste website.
On that website they had an article about making ‘corn butter,’ which is just sweet corn juiced and cooked until thick. With an abundance of sweet corn, why not give it a try? The full story on Gilt Taste can be found here.
I took 8 ears of sweet corn, cut the kernels off them, scraped down the cobs, and put all that into the blender.
I thought no way is this going to liquefy. I figured I’d end up scraping a mess of gummy corn kernels out of the blender for the chickens to eat. But to my surprise after just a few minutes it had turned kernels into corn juice.
I pressed the corn juice through a strainer.
There was only a couple tablespoons of pulp left in the strainer when I was done. I then cooked the corn juice for about 5 minutes until it was thick and bubbling.
The article on Gilt Taste waxes rapturous about the taste of the final product, but to me it tastes like, well, corn. It strikes me as similar to tomato paste. Like I use tomato paste when I want to boost the tomato flavor in a dish, I’ll use this to boost the corniness of a recipe.
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