My brain, if nothing else, is a fount of useless trivia, so now that I’m investigating how you dry corn for squirrels rather than pay over $2 a pound for pre-dried I’d come up with an odd idea…
Okay, so the directions for drying corn on multiple sites say that you after you blanch the ears you want to keep the corn on low heat in your oven, between 140-150F, for 8 hours (then let them air-dry for 3-4 days before distributing them to the wildlife).
8 hours in the oven? That’s kind of an insane waste of propane and definitely not cost-effective, so I won’t be doing that.
But then I began to think about those articles you see this time a year explaining why you shouldn’t leave your child or a dog in a parked car during the summer - the car gets really hot in the sun. Most of them only talk about how hot it gets after half an hour, but they mostly agree that on 90-something F day the car gets around 120F - this guy even subjected himself to that as an experiment. And this article from a fire department says that it can exceed 150F.
So, if I parked in the sun all day, and threw the corn on a baking sheet, turning the ears every two hours like the oven directions say, how close would I come to replicating leaving them in the oven?
Try just boiling the corn and then setting it either in the hot car or the sun for a couple of weeks. I have grown boiled corn. It seems to speed up the drying process.
Uh…people…any corn you buy for animal feed is mature corn that has been shelled off the cob. It has stopped growing, the stalks are dead, and it has air dried in the field over many weeks. It would seen that any fresh corn would have too high of moisture content and be too expensive to make this practical.
If you have some mature shelled corn from a feed store that has become damp a hot car might work great.
My grandmother would occasionally make parched corn for her chickens in the oven of her wood stove. It swells up about 2X and is kind of interesting as a snack!
Here’s a 1-minute youtube clip of a professional chef baking a pizza in a hot car. The pizza topping even includes corn.
The clip is in a foreign language (Hebrew), but you don’t need to listen to the words…just see how he places the pizza in the car, and a half-hour later takes it out— fully cooked.
(Full explanation: the clip is actually a poignant public-service notice. The narrator is a well known televison personality, a chef who stars in a popular show about cooking. He bakes the pizza in the car, and then in final seconds of the clip reminds you of the tragedy that can happen to a child left unattended in a hot car.
Note to mods: I know that we’re supposed to use only English on this site. But the visuals of the video are self-explanatory , no translation is necesssary to see that a car parked in the sun gets hot enough to burn pizza.)
$2/pound for dried corn might be cheaper then you realize as the pound of corn has the water removed already (and I believe corn is mostly moisture as we buy it for consumption).
But you might look into a solar oven, at it’s simplest a open box with a optional blanket or other insulation wrapped around it with a black interior with a piece of glass or plexiglass placed on top. Just set it out in full sun.
It got hot enough to burn the crust in 30 minutes but he can still hold it in his hand? And why was that thing in the rear view mirror blowing around? And how is it that the pizza burns in 30 minutes but nothing in the rest of the car gets destroyed even when it sits in the sun for 3 or 4 hours? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying a car doesn’t get hot. I’m just calling BS on that video.
I’m curious as to what the lowest temperature it is that pizza crust burns in 30 minutes? And what other things, common to the inside of a car, would be damaged at that temperature?
Oh, and the cheese was sizzling. You’re (Well the video) telling me that it literally got hot enough in there to boil cheese?
I’m willing to give you things like ‘look you can sorta bake cookies in the dashboard, in the sun, when it’s 95 degrees out and you give it 6 hours and don’t mind half done cookies’ to prove a point, but that was burned pizza and in the backseat.
The pizza screen would have scorched the leather. If a pizza can really burn, I’m surprised that seat belt buckles aren’t spontaneously igniting nearby things with low flash points. Do I need to be worried when my kid leaves a wad of Kleenexes in the back seat?
ETA, FTR, I have had lighters explode in my car on hot days. But they’re always the really cheap ones.
Check out your local Tractor Supply store – ear corn for under $1/pound and 50 pound bags of shelled or cracked corn for under $9. They also have the best prices for wild bird seed I’ve found.
The biggest problem is that all that moisture has to go somewhere, and it’s going to end up in your car, steaming up your windows. But aside from that, sure – cars are notoriously good solar ovens. Can’t hurt.
It would have to be vented. A lid that’s slid off an inch or two might work. Better yet, put the lid on so there’s a gap at both ends (either make your own lid or just find a way to put this one on ‘wrong’ maybe diagonally’), then, if you cover half of the tank with paper, that side will be cooler and you’ll get a slight breeze/internal convection. Air will fall on the shaded side, move to the hot side and rise back up through the other vent and carry the moisture away.
Sweet corn like you buy in the grocery store is about 75% water. Dried corn that you use for feed is about 15% water. It seem impossible that you can economically justify paying for for sweet corn to turn into animal feed corn even if the drying would be free.
Wikipedia says that dehydrators go up to 130 degrees for vegetables. On an 86 degree day the interior of a car can reach 130 degrees in an hour. So it would be possible to dehydrate the corn in a car. It would probably take longer than in an oven since more heat would be lost when you open the car door rather than the oven door.