Grilled Corn Salad

We love it when fresh corn comes into season. We’ve been seeing it in stores recently and have been getting excited about all of our favorite ways to cook corn, like this grilled corn salad. We made our first fresh corn of the season on our trip to the goat farm with our friends a few weeks ago. We already have a list of things we’ll do with corn throughout the summer, so check back for more ideas in the next few weeks.

The grill is probably our favorite way to cook corn, for a few reasons. First, corn likely goes with whatever you’re grilling, so it’s convenient. Second, cooking corn in the husk over dry heat concentrates the flavor more than steaming or boiling. It’s also really easy. Just peel back the husk and pull off the stringy silk.

Season the corn however you like (we love coating it with our favorite herb butter for grilling, also great on oysters), then pull the husk back over the corn. Toss on the grill for a few minutes, turn it a few times, and you’ll have corn grilled to perfection in no time.

We try to keep our kitchen stocked with just the essentials and don’t buy a lot of specialized gadgets, but one tool we’ve found to be really useful is this corn peeler.  It really does make quick work of getting the kernels off the corn cob. You could peel the kernels off dozens of corn cobs in just a few minutes. Another alternative is to use a really sharp chef’s knife, stand the corn cob on end, and slice off the kernels.

This corn salad is simply delicious. There are hundreds of recipes for corn salad online, but we wanted something that lets the ingredients shine. No mayo and no overpowering spices. Just a minced shallot (get instructions here), parsely, really good olive oil (we use this every day, but for this salad something from Round Pond would be ideal), and some lemon juice.