Corn nuts!

When I was a kid, my dad used to make what we called homemade corn nuts.  I wanted to try it myself this year, and I couldn’t remember exactly how he did it, so I looked it up on the internet to see if anyone else had a recipe. I didn’t find any method similar to what I remembered him doing, so I just went ahead and did it the way I thought he had, and hoped I was right.  This method does not produce hard, crunchy, powder-coated kernels like the commercially-made CornNuts, but rather a light, fluffy-crunchy, shiny kernel, which is what I was going for.

When I was at my mother’s house in November, I found a few stalks of dried field corn still standing in a field that had already been combined (harvested), so I picked the ears and peeled off the husks and brushed off the dried silk and other bits of dirt with my hands. If you get your corn out of the field, the ears you take have to be pretty clean to begin with, because you’re not going to be able to wash them with water—you want them to stay dried. They will be mostly clean because they’ll still be in their husks, but you might get some moldy spots on either the husks or the kernels that you’ll have to get rid of.

To get the kernels from the cob, just start at one end and pop them off with your thumb. It takes a while, so I did this while watching tv.

 

 

It gets quite messy with the little red cob fluffs going all over the place. Once I got the kernels off the cob I also sifted them through my hands while blowing on them in order to get even more of the little red bits off.

 Seven and a half ears made these two bowls full of corn kernels. And a mess.

 Close-up of the dried corn kernels. Beeeyootiful colors.  This is the only picture in this set that happens to have a normal color saturation—I accidentally had a wrong setting on my camera phone and didn’t realize it until later. Sorry for the weird orangey glow on all the rest of them.

I used my West Bend Stir Crazy popcorn popper to make the corn nuts. I poured enough canola oil to coat the bottom of the popper—about two glugs, I think?  It was the same amount of oil I would normally use to make regular popcorn.

While field corn doesn’t explode like popcorn, the kernels will still actually “pop” and hit the lid, hence all the gunk on the inside of the lid in the picture.

Don’t try this without a lid!

When the popping slows down to a few pops at a time, you can take the kernels off the heat and turn off the popper. You might want to let it sit for a minute after you turn the heat off because some of the kernels might pop even after they’re off the heat. I salted my corn kernels right away so the salt would stick to the oil on the surface of the kernels. I use popcorn salt because it’s finer; the smaller crystals are lighter and stick better to the corn.

You should also be able to make corn nuts on the stove, if that’s the way you usually pop your popcorn.  But I doubt an air popper would work to make corn nuts, since  the air popper works by heating the popcorn kernels till they explode and then fly up and out of the chute, buoyed by their new white sails. If anyone has tried an air popper to try to make corn nuts, I’d like to know how it went.

Here’s what the “popped” corn nuts look like. You can see some of them actually burst open.  

This blurry picture doesn’t make the corn nuts look very appetizing, but trust me, they are.

 Popped kernels on the left, unpopped on the right. And a strange color haze over the whole picture.

After I got done with this whole corn nut experiment, I told my sister what I had done and she said that our dad had used dried sweet corn, not field corn, and he had shelled the corn and then let it dry out even more by spreading it out on pans in the basement. I think she said he also either had a fan on it (which would help to get rid of more of the red fluffs) or he set the pans on the radiator, or both.  She said he wanted it to be super dry when he popped it. I didn’t do any of that because mine was mostly dry already, and I was impatient to make it.

One of the things I noticed when I made my corn versus when my dad had made his, was that his corn had turned a darker brown when it was popped. My corn still stayed relatively yellow after it was popped. My sister and I thought that since the sweet corn he used had more sugar content than my field corn, it turned brown when it was popped rather than stayed yellow.

Notes:

The main difference between sweet corn and field corn is that sweet corn is usually grown for human consumption. It is, obviously, sweeter. Field corn is usually what is grown for livestock to eat, but that doesn’t mean humans can’t eat it too. See this article from the Extension Service for more information about both.  This is also a pretty good description of the difference between the two types of corn.

Store the popped corn at room temperature in a closed container. I don’t know how long it can be stored like that, since it didn’t last very long at my house.