Yikes!
I bring the water to a boil, throw the husked corn in, turn the heat back off and leave the corn in the pot for maybe 2 minutes at the outside.
Usually butter on it; but sometimes nothing.
Maybe that’s why people are cooking it so long?
Sweet corn needs to be really fresh. Newer varieties less so; but still better if you wait till it’s actually in season locally.
I mostly just boil it, and eat it. I usually consider the butter overkill, as corn has this creaminess to it on its own. But very occasionally I have put butter on it. And I may occasionally salt it if I’m in the mood for that.
I usually do the boiling in the microwave, and cook it from frozen. I read how to do it that way, and don’t really notice a difference (same as basically everything else boiled). It’s only when you grill that I notice a difference.
I don’t know the length of time. Just until it is warm enough, I guess.
My mom grew up on a farm, and we went back to visit in the summers. My aunt grew sweet corn in her kitchen garden, and she taught me that the way to prepare it was to start a pot of water to boil, go out in the garden, choose the ears that look best, shuck them on the porch, and dunk them in the water just long enough to get them hot. According to her, if the corn is ripe and fresh, it doesn’t technically need cooking.
It’s a little more difficult these days, but nowadays I buy farmstand corn and try to cook it within three days. I boil it three minutes, five if it’s more than a couple of days old.
This is the basis for a well worn joke about pirates.
This was true back when it was a kid, and the corn sugar turned to starch quickly. But for decades, now, they’ve breed corn that lacks that enzyme, and stays sweet for quite a while.
Fresh corn still doesn’t need much cooking. I dip it in boiling water (or steam, only the bottom layer of cobs touches the water) until it changes color, which is just a minute or three.
I usually eat my corn plain. But if someone else has already buttered and/or salted it, I’ll still eat it. I don’t really like getting the butter all over my fingers, though, and good corn doesn’t need it.
I’ve had grilled corn in Japan, which i liked, and at a Mexican place with a spicy mayo on it. I don’t like either mayo or capsicum-spice, but my whole damn meal had to much pepper, and i was hungry, so i scraped off as much of the nasty mayo as i could and ate the corn.
Another vote for grilling it in the husk, silk and all. Sweet, juicy and delicious.
I found the absolute best recipe a couple of years ago:
Sous vide at 183 degrees for 30 minutes. Seal the butter in with the corn. It is heavenly.
A few decades ago, we were camping in the country together with my in-laws. There was a maize field next to the site and we helped ourselves to some cobs.
We put them on the barbeque, wrapped in foil and butter for a while and were really looking forward to some nice fresh corn on the cob. It was inedible. Enquiries later on established that this was a variety that was grown exclusively for animal feed, not the kind that fr human consumption. Something to do with English summers not being hot enough.
I like it grilled after de-husking - so the kernels get a bit toasted. Then I get a chunk of cold butter, stick it to the blade of a knife and rub it on the hot corn - the butter melts and bastes the corn, but the remainder stays on the knife for use basting the corn again.
Also after buttering the corn I like to sprinkle it either with instant French onion soup powder, or if I don’t have that handy, some of the soup mix from a packet of instant spicy ramen. Don’t hate me till you try it.
We are more than a month away from sweet corn here in New England. I husk them, boil for three minutes, and eat them plain. My husband eats them with mayonnaise, which was tradition in his house (North Carolina). If we ever grilled, I would grill them, but we’re too lazy.
My father’s legendary method (which he never used) was to bring the pot of water out to the garden, shuck the corn and dip it into the water while still on the plant. I suppose you could pull it off the plant before eating, we’re not raccoons.
I still follow his 2-3 minutes in boiling water method. I’ve had a few tremendous ears of corn where it would have been a crime against nature to do any more than just get them warmed up. Less stellar ears can be improved with swaths of butter and seasoning, but the best stand on their own.
That’s what you get for contributing to Road Blight.
– farmers’ term, around here anyway, for people stealing the crop that’s easy to reach from the road. Very often they can’t even tell if it’s edible, as you couldn’t – I had people stealing unripe wine grapes. But in some locations you can lose quite a bit of crop that way.
Yeah. Poetic justice or some such. We only took a few husks from a field that must have had tens of thousands and it was ripe and ready. And we were renting a small part of one of his field as well.
Shucked, smeared with a tiny bit of olive oil and coated in Trader Joe’s Everything But The Elote seasoning. Thrown on a low grill until it’s just barely brown, then buttered.
If I had to guess, I would guess that 95% of corn you see in fields is an edible for human consumption. It’s all animal feed and corn by-products.
Yeah, that’s what everybody says.
That’s a better excuse. If he was having significant problems with it, I expect he’d have said something to you when you rented.
– Field corn (the term, at least around here, for corn grown for livestock feed or for grinding corn, as opposed to sweet corn grown for eating by humans as a vegetable) is edible by humans in the sense that it certainly won’t hurt you and may provide some nutrients, but it’s tough and not sweet. Some varieties, if you pick them at just the right stage of unripeness, make a passable roasting corn; but you have to get them at the right moment, and a variety grown for the purpose will still be a lot better.
If it’s really fresh (which around here means towards the end of summer), I just heat it up. The Mirai corn from Harvard, Illinois, you can eat without cooking, but I like to throw it in a pot for two-three minutes.
More usually, I either grill it in the husk (if I’m feeling lazy), or grill it dehusked (if I’m feeling like being a little more attentive. Better flavor.) Or start it in the husk, dehusk it, and finish it direct (best of both worlds.) I don’t usually soak it – I just throw it on as is, unless I don’t have a lot of husk.
Indoors? I just chuck dehusked corn in a pot of boiling water until done. How long that takes depends on how fresh the corn is. Usually, I just have one ear that I taste every few minutes to see how far along it is. Can be anywhere from about 3-10 minutes to finish.
Typo. That should read “isn’t edible” (in that it’s not sweet corn.)
And I was wrong - it’s 99%.
Given how many cattle we raise and how much HFCS there is in our food, I would have pegged it even higher.
Microwave in the husk. I learned about it on social media.