You Can Make Your Own Corn Milk (and Cook With It)

If you know me, you know I love corn a whole lot. This year, for the first time, I grew my own corn and, though it is a little smaller than the ears you see at the grocery store, it is still sweet and juicy, and I wanted to extract as much flavour as possible from these sweet cobs of mine. So I made some corn milk.

I already always milked the cobs with my knife and occasionally boiled them in water to make a golden corn stock, but recently I’ve been using milk as a corn flavour extraction method, and it works very well.

All you have to do is place your spent cobs in a stock pot and add enough whole milk to just cover them (about a cup per cob should do it, but don’t get hung up on strict measurements). I also add 1/4 teaspoon of salt for every couple of cobs to balance the sweetness and accentuate the corn flavour. Heat the milk over medium heat until it starts to steam and bubbles begin to form, then cut the heat (and move it off the burner if you have an electric stove), cover the pot, and let it steep as it comes to room temperature. Finally, place the whole thing in the fridge overnight. Remove the cobs the next day, and you will have corn-infused milk (not to be confused with this other, much sweeter corn milk, which is very good but a totally different beast).

Corn milk tastes exactly how you hope it would — creamy and corny. It’s sweet, but only as sweet as your corn, and perfect for baking and cooking (but only if the things you are baking and cooking could benefit from a little extra corniness).

You can use corn milk in recipes just as you would regular, un-corned milk — no need to alter the amounts. The uses for corn milk are vast and far-reaching, but my first impulse is to make corn ice cream, an incredibly underrated flavour of ice cream. It would also be good in bread pudding, French toast, egg bakes and scrambles, quick breads, or an old-fashioned hot milk cake. If you can make it with plain milk, you can make it with corn milk (and you probably should).