You know I have piles of sweetcorn. Actually a patch about 200 feet long (about 60 metres) and 8 rows wide. I think that should do us. As you know I feed a fair bit of fresh sweetcorn and all the stalks to the cows, sheep, pigs and chickens but I still have plenty to eat and preserve. This enormous patch of corn is not unusual in these parts. All the farmers here grow piles of sweetcorn. In a land where all the little farms are dying, and the cows and pigs are gone and the barns are full of old cars and rusty tools, still the corn growers will set aside a large patch close to the house to grow the sweetcorn. Like a tendril from the past when preserved and saved food in the root cellar for the winter was all about staying alive. Literally.
I have been wondering how the women preserved all this corn in the past before the advent of freezers. These are enormous patches with hundreds of ears. This is an old tradition. The Matriarch remembers the old women in her family making piles of sweetcorn relish and in the winter this was served out of crocks with every supper. Whereas I have always thought of relish as a complement – in the old days it was The VEGETABLE. So I am going to be filling many many jars with garden relish this year.
My research has directed me even further back to dried sweetcorn or parched corn. The children would help pick and shuck these huge patches of sweetcorn and some of the best ears would be scraped from the cob, dried spread on roasting dishes in the range oven, then put into paper bags and hung behind the fire (shaking occasionally) until quite dry, then stored in the cellar or basement in jars or covered bins. This was a winter staple.
I am going to start some in the oven today. It might take days though. I will let you know.
Also I will leave a portion to dry in the field on the stalk and if the deer do not get it first I will knock off the kernels, jar them and compare them with the oven dried method.
Evidently rehydrated and cooked dry sweetcorn was a traditional thanksgiving dish of the Midwest. The dried sweetcorn can also be made into cornmeal.
Anyway come and see what I was up to in the kitchen yesterday. These are my three favourite ways with sweetcorn.
Sweetcorn Relish. Every time I make this relish it is slightly different because as well as the corn I add other vegetables from the garden.
My goal is to make a relish from the gardens every day to spice up the stews and casseroles that I will be making on the woodstove in the winter. I have previously avoided making too much relish because no-one else loves it with cheese and apples or cold meat like I do. It is not an American taste.I have only ever seen it used on hot dogs. But now that I see it as a side dish it makes perfect sense. Also if I add it TO the winter stews by the jar full it is more likely to be eaten and enjoyed. The relish of the day is Sweetcorn Relish.
This relish is an adaptation of Eloise’s Sweetcorn Relish over at Simple Recipes so if you would like the original proportions do pop over and see. Yesterday I replaced the cucumbers with zuchinni, and added coriander seeds from the garden. Who knows what I will do today. I always use the water bath method at the end too.
During sweetcorn season we eat Sweetcorn straight off the cob and dripping with butter and in my case pepper and salt every single day. Sometimes more than once.
To make life very easy we Microwave the Corn on the cob and IN the Leaves.
This is too easy – you will love it. Pull off only the very outer leaves, leave the corn wrapped in its leafy blanket and leave the silks. Pop the whole corn in the microwave for Four minutes. When you pull it out, lay it on the chopping board and slice the lower part of the fat end and stalk. About an inch and a half. Then pick the corn up by the silky end and give it a shake and watch the the clean corn cob slide right out.
Lovely.
Now to Freeze corn on the cob. I don’t like frozen corn so I make individual cobs for other members of the family. Freezing corn is all about speed.
Here are the secrets. Freeze your corn as fast after picking as possible. Mine is ten minutes from the field to the freezer. Peel and blanch for 6 minutes in rolling boiling water, in batches of three or four, you want the water to maintain the boiling temperature so you can start timing immediately, when cooked drop the corn cobs immediately into water loaded with ice cubes. Cool it fast. Dry, roll in cling film, (saran wrap, glad wrap whatever it is called in your country) and into the freezer straight away. Straight away.
The other thing to remember is that you corn is already cooked. So you only need to reheat! A long cooking time will result in mushy corn.
Good morning. Let me show you my most favourite thing in the kitchen.
It is this big metal tray. It make clean up amazingly easy. I use it for everything from rolling out pastry, kneading bread, to making pizzas to chopping greens and making salsa. I can pile vegetables and my chopping board in it and nothing rolls anywhere! It is perfect for my very tiny kitchen.
Well we all know what I am doing today!
You all have a lovely day too.
love your friend, celi.
The Kitchen's Garden 
60 responses to “How to cook and preserve sweetcorn”
Oh this is a fabulous post and made me green with envy. In France they look at you askance if you ask for sweetcorn. They grow fields and fields of maize (corn) but it is either made into corn oil or fed to the cattle and chickens. When we were first here, we asked permission to pick a couple to cook, meeting with gales of laughter! They were inedible, so it’s obviously a different variety. You can buy little tins of Green Giant, but it’s not the same as sinking your teeth into a hot buttery, peppery cob.
The heavens have just opened with a deluge, the third today. I can hear the grass growing, so we’ll probably have to do another cut before taking the ride-on mower to our friends who are buying it from us.
No sweetcorn, what are they like?! do you have room for a garden in the new place? If I remember rightly it is pretty small which will be nice.. c
Not big enough for sweetcorn! I spent the morning with the pot garden, planting some new stuff for Autumn colour and re-arranging what we had. The only edibles are mint, parsley, basil and chives.
Cinders….this is one of the corniest blog posts yet! 🙂 Ha! Now I can’t wait to go out and get some ears to microwave…I think I’ll do that today…that sounds sooo easy! And we all love easy, right? And don’t you just love cornsilk…I mean to look at, not eat! I had a beautiful sweater in high school..in fact I had my senior photo taken in it and it’s color was called cornsilk! And when I was much younger than that I would take cornsilk and try and stick it on my dollies heads….so they would be blond! Like you! 🙂 Ok, my comments are way off topic here but the corny post triggered some old memories! 🙂
PS. Your photos of all those fresh from the garden veggies are beautiful!!
I love it when you go off topic!! c
I love your tip on how to freeze the corn on the cob and the idea of the sweet corn relish. I am working on a corn post, too, as we’ve had a lot of local corn this year. It’s a great thing!
I look forward to reading about what you are doing with your corn bounty!! c
Your post just makes me realise how much earlier your summer harvests are – my sweetcorn doesn’t’ usually ripen until the end of august / beginning of Sept, that is if the badgers don’t bloody get there first!
We have racoons or in my case Boo. Who will launch himself AT the corn stalk and try to rip the corn off by himself. Then he runs off and eats it.. crazy dog! c
I love that cooking tray idea. They used those that way in a cooking school I used to go to all the time. I don’t know why I never thought to do that at home. And your corn all looks and sounds delicious. I’m really curious about the relish. I don’t think I’ve ever had corn relish. 🙂
Maybe I will tuck a little jar in my bag! c
Corn relish took me back to my childhood – I also like it just with cheese on toast or a sandwich, and my favorite dip… mixed with Philly cheese (sometimes sour cream) and served with Jatz or celery and carrot sticks 🙂
Is all your corn ripe at the same time? Ours is planted sequentially. The first comes in before July 4 and the last will be picked in October.
That sweetcorn relish does look absolutely amazing….fantastic colour…I can taste it. So much sweet corn here but none for humans. You’ll not see an ear of corn in any shop or market stall even though you might just have driven through several kilometres of corn fields.
that’s so wierd that my first comment came in as anonymous but you knew who it was…who else can’t keep a train of thought?? 🙂
hey, where is chicago john…I haven’t seen him on the blog for awhile…oh I know…prolly in michigan!
I’m pretty jealous of your piles of sweetcorn, actually I’m really jealous! This year our corn did not do that well and that just makes me pretty darn sad. I’m living my corn fantasies through you!
What an interesting lesson! Compared to other vegetables corn is not such a ‘big thing’ here Down Under: available in season of course, but mostly bought for soup or stirfries frozen! But wonderfully healthy and rich in fibre, so all your ‘ways’ have been marked and shall try next season: that relish has so many of my favourite things in it 🙂 ! Can’t believe the cornfields looking so abundant after the rotten beginning you had to the season . . .
we used to eat it like crazy for about two weeks in NZ and then nothing, i cannot remember my mother freezing it, but then she did not have half a year with nothing growing at all.. NZ on the east coast is pretty easy living.
Ditto us, of course – or all the visiting Cookery nabobs would not always be commenting about our ‘wonderful produce’ 🙂 ! Hope it was a good cooking day, Miladay!!!!
Local sweetcorn isn’t quite ready here in east central Wisconsin but I hope to get a bunch to freeze when it is. I generally blanch the ears then cut the corn off the cob and bag it for the freezer – tastes like summer in Feb.!!! We have two dogs, 1 big, 1 little who have to be fenced out of the garden. I left the gate ajar earlier this year and the two ate all the asparagus. Given the chance they’ll eat the beans off the bushes and the tomatoes off the vines!
Oh MY! Your dogs sound like Boo. He will eat the peaches off the trees not the mention the corn! I had better talk to him about the tomatoes.. that really would be trouble!! Thank you for the heads up!! c
I so look forward to the yearly crop of sweet corn. Such a treat!
I just read the previous comment about tomatoes and dogs. Max went after mine, knowing that I’d chase him. Problem was tomatoes are in the nightshade family and, to a dog, the plants smell the same. Max playfully grabbed those red nightshade berries and ate some before I could catch him. Within minutes, we were running to the vet and then onto the emergency vet. I almost lost him. Luckily, it was at summer’s end and he forgot all about his “game” over the winter. Still, we — the boys upstairs and I — are on constant patrol for those vines and their berries.
Gosh, that Max! He is a treat! c
I am hankering for some fresh sweetcorn. Saw signs posted along roadways this weekend, meaning it’s ripening here in Minnesota. Finally.
My mom used to make sweet corn relish, too. Also, creamed corn was in canning jars, too.