This weekend, we were gifted with a dozen ears of lovely fresh corn.  Thank you, Brenda and Bubba!  We can’t eat that many between the two of us so we decided to try freezing some.

The canning gods say to “Water blanch small ears (1-1/4 inches or less in diameter) 7 minutes, medium ears (1-1/4 to 1-1/2 inches in diameter) 9 minutes and large ears (over 1-1/2 inches in diameter) 11 minutes.”

Well, you already know about my total aversion to blanching (boiling) vegetables to flavorless mush before freezing, so we’re going to try this:  grilling it first in lieu of blanching and see what happens!

First, whack off the “tip” and the “tail” of the ear.

Then, take off the outer husks but leave the nice tender inner husks on.

So now we’ve prepped the corn.

Put the ears of prepped corn into a big pot of lightly salted cold water (a pinch or two of salt is all you need).  Let them soak in the water for a couple of hours.

Tear off some sheets of heavy duty aluminum foil and get out some butter and salt.

Smear some butter on the husk and add a pinch of salt.  There’s a magical thing that happens to corn when you add butter and salt…

Turn the buttered side down, put the ear on a diagonal to the foil, and start wrapping.

Turn in the ends of the foil and wrap it up into a neat little package.

Roll it around with the palms of your hands to make sure the foil is tightly wrapped around the ear of corn.

Stick the wrapped ears back into the soaking water until you’re ready to cook them.

Put the ears onto the grill over low heat.  Our grill gets hotter towards the back than in the front, so we rotate them around front to back, and roll them around so all the sides of the corn get roasted.  Grill roast them about an hour.  BarBBQ Bill is very non-specific on timing issues – he just says “Until it smells like it’s done.  If you can’t smell it, it ain’t done.”

After the ears cool, put them (still wrapped in the foil) into a large freezer bag and pop them into the freezer.

Oooooh, yeah.  See that golden brown natural sugar that has caramelized on the husks and permeated the corn with incredibly delicious flavor.

We need smell-o-vision here.

Some grilled chicken and pattypan squash to go with the corn completes a great summer meal.

Update:  We served some of the corn to company this weekend.  Delicious!

They didn’t believe it had been frozen, and wasn’t “fresh from the field”.  A tip on reheating – we used our water smoker to gently reheat it, so the smoker doesn’t “cook” it any further.  Next time, we’ll undercook the corn slightly before freezing, so we have a bit more leeway in reheating and won’t be as likely to overcook it.

This will be our freezing method of choice from now on.  These are gonna taste really good in the middle of winter!

Bookmark This Post