Jacques Pépin Makes Fresh Corn Purée

(gentle cheerful music) - Hi, I'm Jacques Pépin, and this is "American Masters at Home."

I want to show you how to make a fresh corn purée, one of my favorite dish of the summer.

It's like fresh polenta, if you want, or grits, you know, grits, polenta, is cornmeal or corn flour mixed with water.

This is the corn, fresh.

Different ways of removing the kernel.

You can cut them in half like that and go with a large knife.

You can also do it this way, holding the corn this way, not higher than your finger, and go with a knife like this, back and forth.

And you want to cut.

You don't want just to apply pressure.

No, you want to cut.

So again.

And depending on the corn, sometimes corn, very large corn, you can get close to a cup of kernel per corn.

Those are smaller.

But they are really very, very sweet.

As you can see, I have about two cups of kernel here.

I'm gonna put them in the food processor.

Small food processor there.

Always work better when the corn are really fresh, and when they are young.

I clean up my food processor, and as you can see, the mixture is almost liquid.

So I'm gonna just sauté that now with a couple of tablespoons of butter.

And I'm gonna cook this in there, and even though it's totally very liquid here, it's going to thicken in the pan because of the corn starch, for the starch that you have in there.

Here it is.

I want to boil this, for 10, 15 seconds.

Salt.

Probably a quarter of a teaspoon, a dash of pepper.

So that's a very light, delicate purée of corn.

You would swear that I put a ton of sugar in there, but I haven't.

And that's it.

Put a bit of chive in there.

Get me some color.

A fresh purée of corn.

(gentle cheerful music) A treat of summer, fresh purée of corn.

Happy cooking.

Thank you for joining me.

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Thank you, and happy cooking.