Brown Butter Corn Cake with Whipped Crema and Fizzy Plums

Oh, the pressures and delight of summer produce!

Hello again!

It’s hot and getting hotter here in Brooklyn.

We’re in our first heat wave and I fear it will be the first of many this summer. Coming from Alabama, i’m used to a level of heat and humidity that would knock others off their feet but it’s still not my favorite season. I try (and sometimes succeed) to remind myself while sweating at work, sweating on the train, or sweating while writing this newsletter that there are some worthwhile perks of summer. We’re about to be up to our knees in big juicy tomatoes, melons ready to split at their seams, and soon we’ll have so much corn that we won’t know what to do with it all.

I get a little stressed every summer that I might not make it to the farmers’ market to find *the* best tomato ever or that I won’t enjoy enough berries or melons before they leave us again for the year. I wrote this recipe and tested it multiple ways to hopefully reduce that stress for you. If you have some really delicious fresh corn, it will be amazing in this cake. However if you can only find canned or frozen corn it will still be great and a fitting celebration of summer, no sweat.

I’m a big fan of corn in all of its forms. I eat grits year round and I can’t stop myself from adding cornmeal to almost any cake or cookie batter that sits still long enough. I even think my pulse quickens at the mere mention of cornbread. I’ve been eating it and making it my whole life and I feel like as a southerner by birth i’m supposed to have very deep feelings about what it is and isn’t. Such as an unwavering opinion on whether you add sugar or not. And i’m also supposed to have an allegiance to either white or yellow cornmeal and the coarseness of its grind.

cornbread with scallions and cheddar - recipe from Julia Turshen

While I do come from a family and region with a particular way of making cornbread. (cornpone - which is neither sweet nor leavened) I don’t feel well suited to tell you what you *should* be doing with corn or any other fleeting summer produce in your kitchen. The best cornbread is the cornbread you have and the real beauty of the season’s bounty and hopefully the joy of making anything is that you get to make it your own, at your own pace.

A few notes…

• This corn cake uses a cornbread technique that I learned from chef Kelly Fields who has an outstanding cornbread recipe in their book “The Good Book of Southern Baking” that calls for soaking your cornmeal in buttermilk before mixing. This slightly softens the cornmeal, leaving it delightfully toothy but not gritty.

• Canned evaporated milk is milk that has been steamed to reduce the water content by about 60%. It’s rich and has a creamy taste, almost like half & half. It’s a wartime/depression era ingredient that I think is underutilized in contemporary baking. I grew up eating it on oatmeal with butter and sugar.

• I tried to use as many forms of corn as possible in this cake, knowing that each form would play an important role. Cornmeal provides a nice texture, corn flour (maize flour in the UK) provides tender softness, and cornstarch (corn flour in the UK) helps hold things together in this gluten free cake. If you don’t have cornstarch, tapioca or potato starch will also work.

• The plums are lightly sautéed with brown sugar and kombucha so that they retain their shape and a little bit of their bite. The kombucha deglazes the pan that was previously used to brown your butter and adds a delightful effervescence to the plums. I highly recommend chilling the plums overnight in the sweetened cooking liquid if possible but an hour or two in the fridge will help concentrate their flavor and color nicely.

• The whipped topping is made with Mexican crema. It’s richer than sour cream but still has a nice tang. If you can’t find crema, feel free to use sour cream, crème fraîche, or greek yogurt.

Brown Butter Corn Cake with Whipped Crema and Fizzy Plums