Corn Fingers

Sunday, June 25, 2006
This is the 41st recipe I've tried! That means I'm halfway there--I've baked 41 out of 82 recipes from The Bread Bible. I feel good because I think I'm really going to make my goal, but I'm also wondering what I'm going to do without this obsession to keep me happy.
If I need to be happy next year, I guess I could whip up a batch of these corn fingers. They're easy to make, if you don't count cooking the corn and cutting it off the ears (I ran into a friend at the grocery store, and he eyed my two ears of corn--"You can actually buy this stuff in cans, you know," he said, but I don't think it would have tasted so sweetly tender). The same person advised against buying the coarse-ground cornmeal (the only stone-ground cornmeal available in the store); he said he'd used it for cornbread, and it was too rugged. I agree with him on this point--I think these sticks would have been a little better with a finer grind. Still, that's just nit-picking. The combination of the sweet corn, the hot red pepper flakes, and the buttery-rich batter is a real winner.
I was less pleased with the molds. Maybe it was just because this was the first time I'd used them, but they didn't really unmold that willingly. I had to fill up the bottom of the dish with the rag-tag corn sticks and cover them up with the few that turned out pretty well in order to get a decent picture. If you're not taking pictures, though, and you're not serving guests, you probably won't care. Although, come to think of it, if you don't have guests, and you don't want to invest in the cast-iron pan that's a little iffy about the unmolding process, you can just bake a pan of cornbread with this recipe.