Southern-Indian Corn in a Cream Sauce

My wife loves corn. She was getting canned creamed corn from the store, but they stopped carrying it and thus asked me to figure out how to make it.

She sent me a recipe she'd found, and then I quickly started to adjust it for the household biases and preferences. Frequently, this means that I'm seeking to make it more like Indian food and potentially a little more intensely flavored. Also, my wife likes to make things a little thicker in consistency than normal, so I adjusted things there.

This is more like an approximation of creamed corn, because I'm taking corn and adding cream, instead of creaming the corn. And I'm kinda putting it halfway between it's vague-Southern roots and Indian food, not quite going all of the way over to making a corn curry.

The standard way just about every Indian recipe starts off with is frying the spices in hot oil. As far as I can tell, this means that all of the fat-soluable flavoring components in the spices will then end up in the oils. At the same time, I decided to do the browned butter thing instead of just going straight for ghee or cooking oil.

This makes a pretty large pot of creamed corn, you can easily halve the recipe.

Ingredients

  • 2 tablespoons butter
  • 1 onion
  • 2 cloves garlic
  • pinch ground cumin
  • pinch red pepper
  • pinch ground coriander
  • lots of freshly ground black pepper
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 4 15oz cans corn kernels, drained
  • 1 pint (2 cups) cream
  • 1 cup whole milk
  • 1/4 cup cornstarch

Preparation

  1. Heat skillet, put butter in and cook it till it turns brown
  2. Add onion, garlic, cumin, coriander, black pepper, salt. Cook till onions transparent
  3. Add drained cans of corn, cook for a few minutes
  4. Add cream, cook for a few minutes until it starts to thicken a bit
  5. Mix cornstarch into milk (add more cornstarch depending on how thick you want it), and cook till it's thickened enough.

Posted:

Updated: