Dried Corn Hulled with Lye
Ingredients
Directions
Make the lye
Boil the wood ashes in 2 quarts of cold water for 15 minutes.
Let the lye cool until the ashes settle at the bottom.
Pour off and strain the clear liquid.
Hull the corn
Mix the lye with an equal quantity of cold water to cover the dried corn.
Boil the corn and lye-water until the hulls begin to break off.
Drain the corn and transfer it to cold water.
Rub the corn between your hands in several changes of water until all hulls are removed.
Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.
Explore the science
What each ingredient does
- Wood ashes
- Their alkaline lye loosens the tough hulls from the corn kernels.
- Dried corn
- The grain whose tough outer hulls are softened and removed by the lye.
The step that matters
Rubbing out the hulls in changes of water. Lye softens the hulls but does not remove all of them. Rinsing in several changes of cold water washes away residual lye and loosened hull fragments, so the corn is clean and no longer caustic.
“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.
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