WOW! Best Grilled Corn

This summer Gourmet Magazine had a huge feature in their issue about grilling that talked about El Salvadoran-style grilled corn. The trick is that you smear the grilled corn with "crazy-loco" sauce (yes i know that is redundant), something different than the butter we usually use.

I was enthralled when I read this b/c I have to confess I am not a huge fan of corn on the cob. It gets stuck in my teeth. It's messy and not pretty and it really does not taste that good. So smearing a delicious sauce on the corn that is probably pretty fattening only made it sound more appetizing to me.

Then, on one of my favorite blogs, The Kitchen Witch posted about making Mexican-style grilled corn, and the recipe she researched was almost precisely the same as Gourmet's El Salvadoran recipe. Same premise, just a slight change in the ingredients.

The main difference between these two recipes is that the El Salvadoran recipe calls for mustard as part of the crazy-loco sauce, and has optional ketcup. The Mexican recipe calls for no mustard or optional ketchup but instead calls for sour cream, and also cilantro (which I did not use.)

I started off prepping the corn as shown in the vivid photo spread in Gourmet. How can you resist glamorous presentation?
Mister Siren was put to work preparing these ears of corn. You peel the leaves down, remove the inner cornsilk (which is kind of a pain), and then use one of the leaves to tie leaves together. These tied-up husks serve no purpose except to act as a pretty handle. I love it!

Here is a closeup of how you do that:

Now thankfully, The Kitchen Witch's post reminded me that you must soak the corn for a good amount of time before you stick them on the grill, so that they do not dry up and burn when you have them on there. I did so. She said do it for 25 minutes. . . . Our grill was already ready for steaks and we were holding up the process, so I got about 7 minutes of soaking done.

But man, I think that made all the difference! The corn, when it came off the grill, was so much sweeter, more tender, juicier than any corn I have had on the cob before! I don't know if my family has just failed to soak their corn before. If you have not been doing so, try it. Maybe I AM crazy-loco, but this corn was out of this world, and I just had some other corn on the cob last weekend for 4th of July, too.

So anyway, then after you grill it and it's all tender (about 10 minutes or more), you take it off and spread this sauce on it.

My sauce was sort of made like this:
1/2 cup mayo (used light mayo)
1/2 dijon mustard
8 oz light sour cream

As I said, you can look at Kitchen Witches and Gourmet's recipes for the true sauces, and then adjust.

THEN, the important part is, you crumble this cheese called Queso Blanco on top of it . . . I thought this was probably the same thing as Queso Fresco but it is actually different, or at least it is sold in a different package and labeled differently, and thank God it is sold at Costco, b/c I had little time to shop today.



You "put a hefty squeeze of lime" on it, and a sprinkle of cayenne pepper if you want it. I couldn't stop eating it! I'm a total convert!

Corn has many fans, and the handle comes in handy, although not everyone loves the sauce and the cheese: