Month: September 2020

Growing up in Idaho, my family didn’t overthink corn, but often we overcooked it. That brief few weeks right around when school started always seemed too short a window for considering alternatives to our usual method, which was: shucked cobs plunged into boiling unsalted water for—ten minutes? twenty?—then affixed with corn holders and rolled, while hot, over a sacrificial stick of butter. I relished these fleeting few weeks around Labor Day that marked the turn of the season, even if a soft, mushy texture had come to define the corn that was the centerpiece of those meals. Since then, many cooks and cookbooks have nudged me in better directions—towards embracing the kernels raw, adding smoky notes by turning the ears over a hot grill, and seizi...