Sweet corn season is in full swing around here and sadly, the season will be ending before we know it. There is nothing like fresh, local sweet corn in the midwest. Maybe fresh picked garden tomatoes are in second place. The past few years I've taken to getting fresh corn from Keller's farm stand in Collinsville which sits right across the road from their acres of sweet corn. You can tell when the season will be winding down by how many fields are now picked bare. I've come to like freezing and bagging corn so we have that good taste during the winter.
This is not a job for the weak, however. It takes time and involves a lot of standing and knife work. One year I made the mistake of buying a whole lot of sweek corn which they sold in huge green mesh bags. Way too much work at once so now I get 3 dozen or so periodically during the season.
The first order of business is shucking the leaves and silk strings. For a long time it was the silk that drove me crazy until someone from our church told me a good way to get most of it off while pulling down the outer leaves. You first cut a chunk of corn off the narrow end which has the tassles and silk wads. After that it is just a matter of finding a bit of seam at the top, grasping each side of the seam with your thumbs and pull down. You may have to do this again on the back side, but boy does this work. Very little silks to deal with.
The next step is to rinse off any remaining silks and drop the corn into boiling water to par-cook the ears. After that get out a bundt or angel food cake pan, put one end of the corn into the pan's hole and slice down the cob with a nice knife and watch the kernels fall into the pan. It's then just a matter of putting the corn into freezer bags.
I have to confess this is rather work intensive if you have a lot of corn, but it is so worth it in winter to pull out a bag of this sweet corn.
Which brings me to one more issue. Our refrigerator here in Collinsville has a freezer section which isn't very big, poorly designed, I believe. Bottom freezer with a couple of drawers not big enough for too much. I looked online over the weekend for small-ish chest freezers and can you believe it? Almost every store was sold out. It must have been a coronavirus type of popular thing to buy so people could stock up on frozen foods. While we were all looking for toilet paper, smarter people were buying freezers. I was shocked, I'm still shocked. But I'm going to do some freezer re-arranging until someone has a small chest freezer we can buy.
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