Posted by Dave Arnold
Tomorrow the school is hosting a premiere party for the movie Food, Inc. The movie rightly comes out against the factory food system here in the U.S. Our dependence on monoculture corn is called out in particular. I thought it would be hilarious to serve some fancy-dan corn syrup at the party. Here is what we did:
Juicing a bunch of corn
We juiced 3.5 kilos of frozen cut corn. Then I hit the juice with pectinex smash to see if it would clarify. It didn’t. Then we spun it in the centrifuge at 4000 g’s to see if it would clarify. It didn’t—it looked like orange juice. Then we gel clarified it (5 grams gelatin per liter of corn juice). Finally it worked. Then we put it in the rotovap and reduced the juice at room temperature to a clear, corn-colored syrup.
3.5 kilos of corn reduced to this. Nickle for size and clarity reference.
Awesome, right?
Wrong. It just doesn’t taste that good. Rats.
Uncooked corn juice always starts to taste fermented to me almost immediately. I bet if you cooked it briefly to get the malard reaction taken care of and that desirable grilled corn flavor going before clarification the result would be tasty.
I’ve used a really low-percentage corn syrup (like 25% cooked corn juice, 75% weak syrup) in a cocktail and it still tasted SUPER corny.
I think you are correct. I’m going to wait till corn season and use fresh corn next time and cook the juice. As a side note we have rotovapped corn and tequila with some good results, but we lost some of the corn flavor when we mixed it with lime and orange.
Yeah corn and acid is weird. Its so good if you squeeze fresh lime on grilled corn, but if you add any acid at all to corn sorbet or ice cream it just muddies the flavor (for me at least).
Ya’ll should do a juicer primer- different types, motor capabilities, fruits, vegetables, etc.
Best bang for your buck
Howdy Moody,
I only have extensive experience on a couple different types. There are a couple I’d need to try but I’ll look into it.