corn

Sweet corn. I think the harvesting is beautiful. It makes me want to drive one of those harvesting trucks and be a part of all the fun that they're having. 

But I cannot help but think of all the things being stripped off and pulled up along with the corn, undesirable things like spiders and their webs with their trapped bugs, dead birds, bird poop, mice, voles, dead bats and the like. And the giant monoculture seems a bad idea, especially with corn, a particularly depleting plant.

I think that I may have just put myself off corn for awhile. 

If only they'd plant the seeds along with a dead fish and squash and beans like native indians taught us to do. But NooOOOoooo. 

There are two main types of corn, you know, dent and flint

Dent corn is most commonly used for animal feed and for milled food ingredients, grits, meals, flours. it has deposits of a waxy starch at the top that makes the dent when the kernel is dried. Popcorn and flint corn have a larger amount of protein that surround granules of starch.

So we're interested in flint type corn.  

A woman online said one of her favorite books is Zingerman's so I bought it and read it.

It is a fun book. [Amazon] You can buy it for ¢75 plus shipping. Ari Weinzweig writes about his obsessions and his travels as they relate to food and how he latched onto trying to find the best of all things. 

Zingerman's is a famous deli. I recall a news item about Obama and his entourage shutting down the whole place for a lunch. For some reason these proprietors don't seem to mind the loss of business for the prestige of a presidential visit even though the entire security detail cannot order their own sandwich. I'm imagining. 

Ari writes at length about his visit to Northern Italy where a single farmer up there still grows an heirloom type of corn called otto file, eight rows, that is spectacular for polenta, its characteristics described in loving detail. He recalls having the prepared polenta at an Italian family's home and deciding that he must carry this type, expense being no barrier. It is expensive on the Zingerman's web site, $12.00 per kilo, $5.45 LB, I think. That's not so terribly bad until you add flat shipping that doubles the cost. 

This corn is expensive because of ridiculously low yields. It is also a late harvest. And picked by hand. Nobody wants to grow the stuff, no matter it tastes better than any other. That is the tradeoff between flavor and production. It just doesn't make sense to grow the low yield pain in the butt types. 

I can find one other vendor that imports the same stuff, Formaggio Kitchen, they are $1.00 more expensive, their shipping is similar. They too are obsessed with recapturing the older type grains that taste noticeably better.

Both places offer promo codes that could bring down the cost significantly if only they worked. I'm convinced at this point those offers are bogus. I had no success with either of them. After a good deal of time spent I gave up, rather angry at trying so long.

A third place I found, AnsonMills offers the same and similar products. I think all the grains there are grown in the U.S. They all have low yields no matter the grain. They all taste better. They are all more expensive. They don't want to mess around with mail order for anything  smaller than four packages of their products. So you have to buy multiples, or try other of their lauded heirloom products. 

Here is what Anson Mills writes about their eight row type of polenta. Their page on this subject is rather lengthy.

Folks often ask us which is better, white or yellow corn? Native Americans grew corn of every color, of course, and even in Charleston today, the best of the heirloom kitchen, mill, and whiskey corns that survived into modern times are, in order of flavor diversity, red, blue, purple, pink, orange, white, and yellow. Our slightly unsatisfying answer to the question of white versus yellow heirloom corns is this: white corn is generally less manipulated from its Native American antecedents than yellow corn, even if both are equivalent-era heirloom varieties. White flavor traits are mineral, floral, and dairy up front supported by lovely sweet and cream corn aromas and flavors. Yellow corn says “corn” robustly up front: roast corn, sweet corn, cream corn, and parch corn, a mélange of corn flavors and aromas with distinct mineral and citrus nuances underneath.