Dried Sweet Corn for Thanksgiving

The family is coming to my house for Thanksgiving dinner.  It's count down time to the big day. On Tuesday I'm picking up a fresh turkey my Mom ordered from Krogers.  I'll cook the turkey, provide mashed potatoes and gravy and also dried  sweet corn, a traditional family dish at Thanksgiving.

Most people around here don't seem to know about dried sweet corn, but it was a staple of the early pioneer diet and there was at least one dried corn factory in this area before the Civil War.  It comes to my family through our Dutch side of the family via some Pennsvlvania German ancesters.  If you travel north around Mansfield, Ohio and into the Amish country you can buy it in the grocery stores. You can also buy it on line, but that's expensive, and besides it very easy to dry sweet corn.

When I was a kid the sweet corn we grew was called Golden Cross Bantam. Golden Cross Bantam was a marvel when it was first introduced over 100 years ago.  It's a yellow sweet corn with a good corn flavor, but like all earlier varieties, it's sugars turn to starch fairly quickly after picking. To keep that good sweet corn flavor  you want to have the water boiling before you pick, which means you really need to grown your own. When the the super sweet corns were developed in the 1980's the starchy problem was greatly reduced. Now you can buy sweet corn at any farm stand or even corn shipped in from Tennessee or Florida and be reasonably sure of getting sweet, not starchy, corn.

To make dried sweet corn, cook a dozen good old fashioned ears of sweet corn in a pot of boiling, salted water for at least 10 minutes. Be sure and choose ears that you would be happy to eat fresh from the boiling water. Drain the ears and cool.  With a sharp knife cut the kernals from the cob and lay them out in a single layer on a rimmed cookie sheet that's lined with foil,  parchment paper or waxed paper with the waxed side down.  Put the  tray(s) of corn in a low 140 degree oven with the door cracked overnight or until the corn is completely dried and a golden nutty brown color. Cool and store in an air tight container. My grandmother stored her dried sweet corn in a cloth drawstring bag in her pantry and invariably it attracted little bugs. I store mine in plastic freezer bags and keep it in the freezer.

The probem with today's supersweet sweet corn varieties is that they are just too sweet. I've tried drying them but whatever gene keeps the sugars from forming into starch, also keep the sugars from developing the nutty color and flavor that is the flavor you want from dried sweet corn. One day I was tossing a bit of frozen corn from a bag of Birds Eye Frozen Yellow Sweet Corn - or some such thing - and noticed that the frozen store bought corn was really a good, corny flavored yellow sweet corn. In otherwords, frozen grocery store yellow sweet corn is NOT from super sweet varieties.  I tried drying the rest of the frozen corn and it worked just fine.  I just poured a bag of the still frozen corn on to a lined and rimmed baking sheet and dried it as usual. It took about 24 hours but the end product was very nearly the same as good old fashioned home grown, cooked, and dried sweet corn.

So, when I was too busy this summer to put up the electric fence in the garden and the racoons ate all my Golden Cross Bantam sweet corn, I just purchased a couple of bags of frozen corn and let it dry in to oven. Now I'm ready for Thanksgiving.

Cream Dried Sweet Corn

serves 8

2 cups dried sweet corn

4 cups water

1 teaspoon salt

2 tablespoons butter

1/2 to 1 cup of cream (your choice)

salt and pepper to taste

Early in the day or the day before you plan to serve it, in a 3 1/2 to 4 quart saucepan,  combine the dried corn, the water and the salt. Bring to a boil and then lower the heat and simmer the corn for at least 1/2 an hour up to one hour checking now and then to see if more water is needed.  The corn should be completely tender when its properly cooked and most of the water will be absorbed.  At this point you can finish the dish with the butter and cream or store the cooked corn in the refrigerator until you are ready to serve. To finish the dish the next day, add the butter and cream and reheat the entire dish until the butter is melted and the corn mixture is steamy hot. Add salt and pepper to taste and serve.  The end product is a sweet, nutty, corny dish that says Thanksgiving to everyone in our family.