I love fresh corn on the cob. But I love even more sweet corn in the middle of winter. To make that happen this winter, and bring back that long missed taste from my childhood, I bought 20 ears of corn from Gypsy Row today – 10 white and 10 yellow.
Putting up corn in the freezer is so easy that I’m not sure why I haven’t done it before now. All you have to do is steam blanch it for 3 minutes and then plunge it into ice cold water to stop the cooking. You can freeze it on the cob, but I’m not sure why you’d want to. To cut it off you can use a corn zipper, a corn cutter or a knife. I started with a corn cutter, but we were not agreeing today, so I ended up using a super sharp filet knife instead. I chose to freeze the white and yellow separately, not really sure why, other than that I did.
To preserve it you can either can it (requires a pressure canner) or freeze it. I think most people that freeze it these days vacuum pack it. Because I’m lazy and cheap, I decided to leave the vacuum packer in the cupboard and do it the way we did when I was a kid. I put 1.5 – 2 cups in a simple pleated sandwich bag and then packed the bags tightly into old yogurt containers, 3 to a tub. Back home we always used old cardboard milk cartons, but since we buy our milk in glass bottles, we didn’t have any. But I did have a nice collection of empty yogurt cartons, so used those instead.
In the end, 20 ears of corn became 13 bags for the winter. That makes 13 dinners that we can enjoy that fresh corn taste straight from the freezer. Yay! I might have to do a few more ears next week as I’ve got one more empty yogurt tub.
Cost: $8 for 20 ears of corn, so $0.62 per bag.
Urban Hennery 