Heirloom Foods – Organic Sweet Corn

Size

Pack of 3

Ingredients

Freshly Harvested Organic Sweet Corn

• Organically grown
• Grown following biodynamic farming principles
• Locally grown
• No GMOs
• No synthetic pesticides
• No synthetic herbicides
• No synthetic fertilisers
• No preservatives

Directions to Use

Remove the outer husks and silk, then rinse before cooking. Sweet Corn can be boiled, steamed, grilled or roasted and served directly on the cob. Alternatively, slice the cooked kernels from the cob and add them to salads, soups, salsas, vegetable dishes, fritters, savoury bakes and other recipes.

For a smoky flavour, grill the whole cob and serve simply with butter or olive oil, herbs, spices and a squeeze of fresh lemon or lime.

What Is Sweet Corn?

Sweet corn and the maize used for maize meal, flour and other grain products belong to the same species, Zea mays. The important differences is when the crop is harvested.

Farmers harvest sweet corn during what is commonly called the “milk stage.” At this point, the kernels are plump, juicy and tender, and puncturing one releases a milky liquid.

By contrast, maize intended for grain remains on the plant much longer. Its kernels mature, become harder and drier, and contain proportionally more starch.

This is why we generally treat fresh sweet corn as a vegetable in the kitchen, while mature dried maize is used as a cereal grain.

Why Does Fresh Sweet Corn Taste So Sweet?

The sweetness isn’t added – it comes naturally from sugars within the developing kernels. While the cob remains attached to the plant, the plant supplies sugars produced through photosynthesis. Once harvested, however, the kernels remain biologically active and some of their sugars gradually convert into starch or are used through respiration.

Consequently, freshly harvested sweet corn can lose some of its characteristic sweetness during storage. Keeping fresh corn refrigerated helps slow these post-harvest changes.

Is Corn a Vegetable, Grain or Fruit?

Interestingly, it can be described in several ways depending on the context.

Culinarily, fresh sweet corn is generally treated as a vegetable because we harvest and eat it while the kernels are young and tender.

Agriculturally, maize is a cereal crop and a member of the grass family.

Botanically, each individual corn kernel is actually a type of dry fruit called a caryopsis, in which the fruit wall is closely fused to the seed coat.

So a cob of sweet corn is essentially a structure carrying many individual fruits.

Did You Know?

Corn is a grass

A tall maize plant may look very different from the grass growing on a lawn, but maize belongs to the Poaceae family. This enormous plant family also includes wheat, rice, oats, barley, rye, millet and sugar cane.

The cob itself develops from the female flower structure, while the tassel at the top of the plant produces pollen.

What are the silky threads inside a corn husk?

Each strand of corn silk is connected to an individual ovule that can develop into a kernel. Pollen released from the tassel lands on the silk. A pollen tube then grows down through the silk towards the ovule, allowing fertilisation to occur. That’s why a well-filled cob depends on successful pollination of so many individual flowers – each properly developed kernel represents its own successful pollination event.

Sweet corn hasn’t always been this sweet

Maize has an extraordinary history of domestication stretching back thousands of years in Mesoamerica. Over generations, people selected maize for different characteristics and uses.

Sweet corn represents one specialised branch of this enormous diversity. Today, different sweet corn types have been bred to retain varying amounts of natural sugar and to keep their sweetness for longer after harvest.

This diversity is another fascinating example of how human selection can produce remarkably different foods within a single plant species.