What’s the deal with everything
For some reason yesterday was my first time dining at Phonatic, a whimsically named Vietnamese restaurant off of Thayer Street. My noodle stir-fry got me thinking, what’s the deal with baby corn and asian food? Corn (i.e. maize) comes from North America, but every time I see baby corn it’s in Asian food. Why are these cuisines drawn to an obviously subpar form of a vegetable we Americans can’t get enough of?
Normally when writing a hard-hitting blog entry/expose such as this, I’d head straight for the Wikipedia entry, then cut and paste. In this case, however, the entry was a little sparse (eight lines?! more like a baby Wikipedia entry if you ask me). Rather then give up, I decided to put my research skills to the test and read, get ready for this, then entire first page of google entries for baby corn.
If you’re looking to grow baby corn, you should definitely check out number three, but for my purposes, number seven was the most informative. It informed me that most baby corn is grown in Thailand, since it’s too labor intensive to be grown here. Unlike baby carrots, which are often just sliced up normal carrots, baby corn is actually corn picked prematurely. This must be done by hand and within a short time window.
Since most baby corn is grown in Thailand, other countries in Asia have access to cheap fresh delicious baby corn. Unfortunately, in America we have access to canned brine-soaked gross baby corn. Stir-fried baby corn is no doubt much tastier in Asia, and I encourage chef’s here to switch over to normal corn, although they would have to remove it from the cob first, plus it might be harder to eat with chopsticks.
The point is, now we all know the deal with baby corn. If you want to hear more about international baby corn production, here’s a news clip discussing recent baby corn production in India. I haven’t watched the entire clip myself, but linking to it still feels like the right thing to do.