supermarket, but I was never too happy with its dominating
smoky flavor, so I switched over to unsmoked salt pork,
which adds the characteristic porkiness without
overpowering the sweet corn. And some days, when I’m
trying to feel extra valorous or have simply let my freezer
run empty, I’ll forgo the pork altogether.
Most chowder recipes call for sweating some onions in
butter, adding your corn kernels, potatoes, and dairy, and
letting it cook down. As it cooks, the potatoes release some
starch, thickening up the broth. None of this bothers me.
What does bother me is what goes into the trash: the
stripped corncobs.
Anyone else out there go for two or three rounds on their
corn on the cob just to suck at the little bits of sweet milk
left in the cob after you’ve eaten the kernels? Like the crispy
fat around a rib bone, that’s the tastiest part. Why would you
want to throw it away? Instead, I use the corn-milking
technique here: scraping out the milky liquid from the cobs
with the back of a knife. By then infusing your base stock
with both the scraped milk and empty corncobs (along with
a few aromatics like coriander and fennel seed), you can
vastly increase the corniness of the finished soup. (I mean
that in a good way.)
It doesn’t take long to infuse the stock—all of 10 minutes,
which is just about enough time to sweat off your onions
and corn kernels. Once you’ve got your corn-milk stock
made, the rest is simple: simmer the onion-butter-stock-
potato mix until the potatoes are tender, add some milk (I
prefer it to cream, as the fattiness of cream can mask some
of that sweet corn flavor), and then puree just enough of it
nandana
(Nandana)
#1