NEVER Boil Your Corn Again — Try This Old FARM Trick

Find All my recipes in one place! Otis Granger Cook Book: https://otisgranger.com/ There's a pot of water coming to a boil somewhere right now, and a pile of sweet corn shucked bare beside it, and in twelve minutes those ears are coming out pale and wet and somebody is going to roll cold butter down the side of one. It'll be fine. It'll be corn. I grew up on a hundred and sixty acres outside Cedar Rapids. In late July there were three dozen ears on the porch every evening, and there wasn't a pot in that house big enough to boil three dozen ears. So my mother didn't boil them. She did something else — and it's why people drove out from town in corn season. I'm Otis. Forty years of barns and estate auctions across the Midwest, and the kitchen is the last room I clear. In almost every one there's a canning kettle "that was for corn." In the houses where the corn was any good, it stayed on the shelf in July. In this one: what happened to sweet corn (and why "put the water on before you pick" was true once) — how to buy it without peeling it — why the pot is the enemy: the sugar leaves, and water can't brown anything — the salt rule your grandmother had, and the half of it that's right — the butter goes on BEFORE the heat, not after — the clock, and how the corn tells you — the knife, and the milk you've been throwing away — and the eighth piece: what she did with the husk that I have never once seen in a modern kitchen. Husk down, silk out, butter and salt, husk back up, tie it with a strip of husk, four hundred degrees for half an hour. No pot. No water. That's the farm trick. Honest, said plainly in the video: charring bare on a grate is a real way too, just not hers. No trick fixes old corn. And if you have to boil it — four minutes, not twenty. Did your mother boil it or do something else — and how many ears could your father eat at one sitting? Ours was eight. Tell me, and tell me her name. I read every one.