The Meatwave

For die-hard Meatwavers, you may have noticed that I've gone a full year with regular posts here, which is triumph after the first three years of throwing up a recipe here and there. In keeping the content up, I've let aspirations of site development fall to the wayside—new design, easy printing, and recipe optimization all seem a long way off. In the fall, with well over 100 posts up, I did make one quiet change though, a search feature that was long overdue. In a constant struggle on trying to decide if I want to pay to remove the ads on it (I hate ads), I keep an eye on what my meaty minions are searching every crevice of this site for. One thing that keeps popping up that has been a big ommision is corn.

Corn is such a backyard staple, it's just not something I felt was really exciting to expand upon, but as I noticed interest in grilling these ears, I started to think more about it and realized that yes, indeed, there is a lot to this seemingly benign food.

First is corn preparation. In my early years, I used to peel back the husk, remove the silk, tie back the husk and soak before grilling. This process is quite arduous when cooking for a crowd, and I started to move towards foil instead of using the aesthetically pleasing natural wrapper. I started to realize I was getting much better results this way, especially if the corn was buttered and seasoned prior to being foiled. The foil was providing just enough protection to keep the corn protected during the cook, but letting enough heat through to still give some nice browning to the kernels here and there—what's grilled corn without a little char?

On a covered grill over high heat, the ears take about 20 minutes to cook, with a quarter turn every 5 minutes. With the butter, season, and foil method, the ears come off the grill ready to eat and delicious, but that long cook offers a chance to consider a world of toppings.

Here I like to play around and corn really becomes interesting. For this batch, I threw together a compound butter of chili powder, cayenne, and lime to slather on once they were done cooking.

Adding this at the end took the corn to a whole new level. The sweetness of the kernels put the spicy butter in check, and together they created a flavor that was incredibly well-balanced.

Now that I'm bumping corn up into the realm of "blog worthy," I'll be be sure to document all the different incarnations and rightfully make corn a proud contender among all the meaty goodness that surrounds it at The Meatwave.

Published on Tue May 24, 2011 by Joshua Bousel

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