Dumbo: Gourmet Extraordinaire - #4: Corns

Good food does not tempt my wife. Generally. But there are exceptions.

For one thing, she's absolutely crazy about corns. Steamed, juicy, lightly salted corns.

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Now, there are corns, and there are corns. How many types of corn have you tasted?

For me, three.

First of all, there are the regular ones selling for about RM1.00 each, which you can easily find at Pasar Malam, along the roadside, or even outside supermarkets. And they taste like, well, what corns should taste like.

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Then there is the "Pearl Corn" (珍珠玉米) variety, which costs about RM3.00 each, as shown in the picture below:


You won't know how juicy and sweet corns can be until you have tasted this variety. No additional flavoring needed.

It is worth every single cent of its seemingly exorbitant price tag.

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Finally, there's the "sweet glutinous corn" (甜糯玉米) variety, with a purple color so dark, it is almost black.

And by the way, my wife has another weakness when it comes to food: she goes for the looks, not the tastes.

And the exotic-looking purplish black corn was totally up the alley, never mind that each one costs RM4.65 where we found it (a hypermarket).


We bought only one, because I wasn't convinced by its look. And a word in the name worried me a little: "glutinous". Huh? Glutinous corn?

So, we steamed the funny little farm produce. It seems such a simple statement, but well, we steamed it for a very long time.

And if you had been wondering - we were wondering, too - the little alien crop is black to its very core.

Then there was the tasting session.

My wife broke it into the two portions you can see here in this picture. But I wisely decided that I would take only a quarter of the thing, so I further broke the tip portion into two parts, and took the smaller part.

Well, you should see the expressions on our face when we took our first bite.

It is sticky (the name says "glutinous"! how could it be otherwise). It is dry. And it is almost tasteless.

I definitely know of better ways to spend RM4.65.

For one thing, if you add another RM1.35, you can get TWO pearl corns.