How To Take Corn Off The Cob

How To Take Corn Off The Cob

For 60 years, The Culinary Institute of America has been setting the standard for excellence in professional culinary education. In this video series, experienced chefs and educators show you how to tackle essential cooking techniques.

Watch this video to learn how to separate the husk and silk from a corn cob and then remove its kernels.

I'm Chef Rob Mullooly from the Culinary Institute of America, and today I'm going to show you this kitchen basic: how to take corn off the cob.

What we need to do is remove the husk from the corn, by pulling from the top and pulling down. You also want to remove that stem at the bottom, and then inside here you've got a lot of silk. The silk needs to be removed because it doesn't taste that good, it gets stuck in your teeth, and it's not that attractive to look at or to eat. And then you have a lot of this silk that gets caught on the cob itself. You can just take a moist paper towel and moisten that up, and we're going to use this to help us take off the rest of that silk.

Now it's nice and clean, you've got some really good color on this corn, it's fresh, and you just want to make sure you remove everything nicely. So now I'm ready to go ahead and take the kernels off the cob.

This is a little bit tricky. You want to have a nice stable corn cob on the board. Then what you want to do is, on an angle, you just want to come in between the kernels and the cob with your knife, and gently follow it all the way down, nice and clean, almost in a sawing motion. We come down one more time, so you get these nice kernels.

Be careful not to go into the cob too deeply. The cob can be slightly bitter. Now we've got some really nice kernels here.

There's a lot of different applications for corn off the cob. Salsa, soup, with butter, a little cilantro, a little thyme, a little parsley, some garlic -- you can take it wherever you want to at this point!

So that's corn off the cob.

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