Sweetcorn.
Sweet, golden nuggets of summer.
Welcome to ingredient, where once a month I take a deep dive into some of my favourite seasonal and store cupboard ingredients. This month I’m focusing on sweetcorn, a piece of produce we all cook with year round but which is at it’s very best paired with fresh summer tomatoes, folded into salads or grain bowls, and wherever possible, cooked outside over coals.
For paid subscribers click here for my recipes for Sweetcorn Polenta with Cherry Tomato & Garlic Confit, Corn & Crab Tostadas, and my Corn & Paprika Butter Penne.
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When I was small, and sweetcorn either came bagged, frozen and then boiled, or out of a tin with the friendly Green Giant on the side. I was very much ambivalent to its existence. In my mind, the frozen stuff was (and still is) pretty evil, but the canned stuff was okay as long as it was mixed into something, like tuna mayo or a bean salad. Is it just me, that, even now when I buy the fancy stuff, tinned corn, eaten by itself has this slightly odd aftertaste that comes just after that burst of sweetness?
Anyway, I digress. My corn eating habits changed forever when our local Tesco started stocking corn on the cob. It was the 90’s when the fresh fruit and veg aisle was only just starting to get exciting, and I was still of an age where, to encourage healthy eating habits, I was allowed to choose a piece of fruit or veg I wanted to try as a treat on every trip, and I think we ended up eating so much corn that year it led to my mother investing in a set of little white porcelain corn holders that still live in the kitchen drawer today. I know the corn demand was all mine, because I’m pretty sure they barely use them these days. Another fun fact: I don’t really like butter, at least unmelted, uncultured butter, anyway, and corn on the cob when I was a child was literally the only way you could get me to eat butter. I’m getting distracted again.
As you can see, I’m growing my own corn this year.1 Last year as part of my father’s ever expanding mission to become almost totally self-sustained by his own home grown product he nurtured three massive corn plants in big pots next to the greenhouse, the cobs swelling temptingly just asking to be plucked from the plant, charred on the barbecue and then slathered in good unsalted butter scattered with French sea salt before we could sink our teeth into their satisfying, juicy, almost creamy crunch.
But, we moved out of my parents annex attic where they had been sheltering us away from our old London life during the first lockdown of the pandemic a few weeks before harvesting so while I carefully took my tomato plants to the new house in the back of my car so they could continue feeding us right through until the end of September, I never got to try a bite of that home grown corn.
For Americans reading this newsletter, the title ‘sweetcorn’ might prove a little confusing because over in your neck of the woods you just call corn corn. But, I sort of like our British name, I think it elevates this wonderful vegetable (I’m calling it a vegetable because that is how we all eat it, but really it is both a grain and a fruit2) by making it more tempting. We always associate something sweet as being good, especially when it comes to anything found in the fresh produce aisle, and I think the addition of ‘sweet’ to it’s name takes it from something plain to something exciting (though, even better is the French maïs sucré that was grown in abundance in the fields around where we had our home in Brittany, because who does not want to eat sugar maize?)
So, sweetcorn. This month what I want is just to get us all to be more creative with this seasonal fruit / grain / vegetable in its fresh form by encouraging you all to try eating it somewhere unexpected. The Americans are fantastic at this, but us Brits? Not so much. But what corn-laiden path have I not yet already, and recently been down? Back in May I shared with you my recipe for Corn on the Cob with Gochujang Mayo (but honestly, the corn slathered in flavoured butter or mayo options are endless) and in my latest book One Pan Pescatarian I’ve provided recipes for a Grilled Mexican Street Corn Salad (pg 73 if you’ve got a copy) and a Creamy Sweetcorn and Chipotle Soup (pg 125) inspired by this brilliant article I read on Food52 about cutting down on food waste by making a delicious corn stock from the cobs you’d usually discard after slicing off the kernels. I covered corn fritters, happily and accidentally vegan, and laced with kimchee, on my blog back in April.
Well, one of my answers came, as if often does if you’re looking to get creative with vegetables, from Yotam Ottolenghi. Yes, yes, I know one of the best things about fresh corn is that sweet golden crunch, but corn’s natural sweetness is still capable of producing something beautiful when the texture is gone, hence why I’ve created a sweetcorn polenta - Ottolenghi has published so many recipes for these over the years - ripe for topping with a rich confit of summer tomatoes and garlic. It’s summer comfort food at it’s finest, and the sort of thing you want to be making on one of the damp, cool evenings this summer seems to be inexplicably paired with.
Next, pasta. Lovely, simple pasta. This is for one of those evenings where you want something fresh and summery, you don’t want to spend much time cooking, but you’re hungry so you don’t want to just dine out(side) on tomato and mozzarella or ham and melon like food writers always seem to be telling you to do when it is ‘too hot to cook’, and like me you’ve moved beyond the delivery radius of UberEats sushi. Here the corn, sliced raw off of it’s cob is tossed in hot miso-spiked paprika butter before being stirred through penne (it is the perfect shape for this because the corn kernels work their way into the tubes) to make a simple supper that takes just 20 minutes to throw together, and that you can eat right out the pan if you’re so inclined.
Finally, like as when I wrote about radishes in June I shared my recipe for a Scallop & Radish Crudo because I’d been obsessively working with raw day boat scallops, my Crab & Corn Tostadas happened because I keep on getting little pots of picked crab on offer, and after crab and corn salad recipes started to flood my summer newsfeed I had a bit of a fridge rummage. These tostadas are the indulgently excellent result, perfect for a light lunch or summertime starter. The sweetness of the corn and the crab play off each other beautifully, lifted by a zingy, creamy lime mayo, and a generous amount of fresh chilli and coriander. It's a fantastic recipe, even if I’m not all together happy with the pictures I managed to take of it.
I’m quite happy with where I ended up, and I want to encourage you all to try something new and unexpected with sweetcorn this month, be it one of these recipes for paid subscribers, or something else.
And after seeing this post on Riverford’s Instagram feed last night, I’m terrified of my corn developing corn smut, but a small part of me seems to be hoping for it so I can sample this supposed Mexican delicacy? The Mexicans rarely go wrong when it comes to selecting good things to eat.
https://www.popsci.com/is-corn-fruit-vegetable-or-grain/