It’s corn season–yay! Unfortunately, at my house, that means I’m constantly looking for a better way to get the actual kernels off the cob.* Braces and corn-on-the-cob do not mix well.
It seems like every year or two, someone comes up with a new and improved gadget for stripping an ear of corn. I try them all. They never live up to the advertising.
This is my current collection. The big yellow one in the middle–the one with the extra-wicked looking blades–that’s the one I like best. It is not, however, finger-friendly. You stand the contraption up on its end (being careful, because it’s tippy, and as the pile of flayed, sticky kernels grows on your cutting board, it just gets more precarious) and scrape the ear of corn down. Those jagged teeth tear the kernels off, making a giant mess everywhere–I usually have corn in my hair, down my shirt, on my face–but it works–the corn comes off the cob.
Honestly, if you’re any good at all with a knife, it’s simpler to just slice down the sides of a cob. But for whatever reason, I do think the cutter produces corn of a different quality–it seems juicier, somehow.
Of course, that could just be a lack of knife skills on my part.
*When I was a kid, I was a little . . . um . . . indulged, shall we say? I didn’t care for corn on the cob; I preferred that nice juicy, creamy pile of corn off the cob. When we visited my grandparents in the summertime, Grandmother, eager to dote on me, would jump up from the table, over my parents’ protests, and whip out her huge butcher knife to cut my corn off the cob. (She also let me eat Hershey’s syrup out of the can, but that’s another story, for another time.)