Asakiyume mita

Last week mallorys_camera and I visited Mike's Maze, and I purloined an ear of corn from the walls of the maze. This corn is obviously not sweet corn for eating boiled or grilled--it's long in the tooth and deep yellow and gives the impression of being the sort of corn you might grow for milling into cornflour, or some other use like that. I don't have a picture of it still on the cob, but here it is as kernels in a bowl:



I was wondering what it would be like to try to pop it. I know that nowadays corn for popcorn is bred specially for that purpose--but what would this corn do? (Here is a picture of kernels of popping corn, for comparison)



I also know that you're supposed to dry popping corn before popping it, if you get it on the ear. (If you get it in a bag, it's already been done for you.) I wanted to speed that process up, so I put my kernels in a warm oven for a while. Was it enough time? Who knows! An uncontrolled variable creeps in.

I do my popcorn in a frying pan on the stovetop, so that's what I did this time. It sizzled for a long time, but eventually I heard some pops! Not that many, but some. I took the lid off the frying pan...



You can see that some of them started to bust open, but couldn't quite free themselves. Here's another picture:



For comparison, here's what my ordinary popping corn popped up to:



Here's the amazing thing, though: those not-quite-free popped kernels of maze corn (maze maize; I love it) taste ~wonderful~. They have a real tortilla-y, corn-chip-y flavor, whereas ordinary popcorn, let's face it, is not the most flavorful food in the world. My maze maize popcorn I happily ate just as it was, whereas I'm hard pressed to eat ordinary popcorn without sprinkling melted butter, salt, or herbs on it (or, if I'm in England, sugar). Furthermore, with the maze maize popcorn, even the kernels that looked just semi-swollen, with no hint of the white cloud on the inside showing through, were light and crispy when I bit into them--no risk of cracking a tooth!

Overall, I'd say it was less like eating popcorn and more like, I don't know, a sort of fluffy nut? But very satisfying! Very flavorful. I feel empowered with secret knowledge. I CAN POP ALL THE CORNS.