I have to admit that I’ve been quite taken aback by how popular the new potatoes with butter and soy sauce [1] recipe has been. Butter and soy sauce are so familiar to me as a tasty combination that I hadn’t quite realized that it would be new and exciting to a lot of people.
Anyway, here’s another extremely simple yet delicious way of using this magic combination on another summer vegetable - sweet corn. Here in Europe, eating corn on the cob is a relatively new custom imported from the U.S. - corn around here is either dried and ground up (as polenta and so on), or used as animal feed. So it’s not always possible to buy great, very fresh sweet corn. This treatment can perk up even an ordinary supermarket-bought corn on the cob, and will really shine with corn that you’ve just picked from your own garden.
Preheat the oven to 180°C / 360°F.
Unhusk and de-silk the corn.
For every ear of corn, use about 1 to 2 Tbs. of unsalted butter. Soften the butter, and smear it all over the corn, so that it goes into all the crevices.
Wrap each ear of corn in a large piece of kitchen parchment paper (aluminum foil will work too), twisted each end tightly as if you were wrapping up a big piece of candy. Place the wrapped corn on a baking sheet. Make a small opening in one seam and pour in about 2-3 tsp. or so of soy sauce, and roll the corn around a bit to distribute the soy sauce.
Bake for 15 minutes, then turn over. Bake an additional 15-20 minutes.
Serve each ear of corn on a big plate, wrapper and all. Each person opens up the paper to eat the corn. Here’s how a wrapped one looks next to a partially unwrapped one.
The butter will have penetrated into the corn kernels, while the soy sauce adds a great salty-yummy flavor. (You can dip the corn as you eat it in any residual soy sauce in the paper.)
Links:
[1] http://www.justhungry.com/new-potatoes-with-butter-and-soy-sauce-shinjaga-shouyu-bataa