Keepin' it sweet

Preserving summer sweetcorn for those long winter months

By Renae Ronquist

The

Woman

Today

Voted Best Wine Selection

in the Duluth News Tribune’s 2020 Best of the Best Contest.

Growing up on a farm in southwestern Minnesota our summer days were always filled with hard work. Whether it was rising early to work in the fields, or picking the bounty of our gardens, or preserving the fruits and vegetables from our gardens, there was always work to be done. Working the fields was always dirty, dusty, hot and sometimes muddy from the previous night’s rain. So when I got to stay in the air conditioned house to work on preserving fruits and vegetables it was a good day!

It was a lot of work, but worth it. Our preserved food always tasted better than bought from the store. Freezing sweetcorn was a family event. We all pitched in. From picking straight from the field, to cooking and bagging.

Preparing corn for the freezer isn't hard to do, but definitely messy! Everything in the kitchen will be sticky, especially the floor! The corn kernels pop when you're cutting them off and the sweet juices fly everywhere.

Here's how our family preserves sweetcorn. Give it a try. Once you taste it you won't go back to store-bought, canned corn. D

Freezing Sweetcorn

Ingredients

9 cups uncooked sweetcorn

2 cups hot water

1/4 cup sugar

Tools

Cookies sheets

Vegetable brush

Electric knife

Measuring cups

1 Quart freezer bags

Instructions:

1. Shuck all the ears of sweetcorn. I do this part outside because it's very messy. I keep the corn in coolers as I work on the next steps.

2. Submerge a few dozen ears in the sink with cold water and start brushing the tassle hairs off of the corn. I also cut off any bad parts that might be on the ears. Step 1

3. There are all kinds of gadgets out there to cut the corn off the ear, but I prefer to use an electric knife. It is the fastest! Step 2

4. In a large pot on the stove mix 9 cups cut corn, 2 cups hot water and 1/4 cup sugar. Bring to a boil for 3-5 min. You will see the color of the corn change to a nice bright yellow. Repeat this step of cooking batches of corn. Step 3

5. For this step you will want to have a large area to place several cookie sheets or large shallow pans to pour the hot corn into to cool down. At this point your kitchen will be steamy hot! I like to have a fan blowing to help cool the corn faster. (See page 56)

6. Once the corn is cooled enough to handle, you can start filling your bags with the corn. I like to use a 1 cup measuring cup for this. That way I can measure appoximately how much I'm putting in the bags. For our family of four I like to put two cups in each freezer bag. Make sure to get a little bit of the juice in each bag too. Squeeze all the air out and seal the bag. I place the bags back on a clean cookie sheet to freeze them. When using freezer bags, you can store them in your freezer nice and flat so they don't take up up as much room, and they thaw very quickly for those last-minute meal preps.

10 dozen ears of sweetcorn (average size ears) = approximately 30 bags of sweetcorn (2 cups each)