Orange Flint Corn - SESE

[12540dumont]

I have a jar of dried ground sweet corn. Does not make for good bread or polenta. What's it good for? It's too sweet for anything savory.

So really, listen to Dar. If you want to eat corn that's boiled (Polenta or Grits) Use Flint.
If you want to bake, use a good flour corn.

That said if you only have room or climate for flint, soak the ground flint before baking with it.

I have found that for our personal use, sweet corn is not that useful. For the market, it's okay. Except for those people who insist on pulling the shucks down.

[massachusettsgrower]

Yes, I do have a big patch going in of flour corn. It's so soft a dried kernel can be chewed up. My only concern about the flour corn is the bear that's frequents the blackberries on the periphery. A guy who goes there says the bear sometimes lies there and watch him pick! So I don't know if the bear will get flour corn crop or I will! Has anyone heard of bears eating corn? Do I have to worry about my crop going down the bear's throat?

I bought some seed of two dent corns that are sold by some of the best seed houses, Wapsie Valley, for example, is the ONLY dry corn offered at Fedco, and Fedco recommends it highly. I will agree it is palatable, makes decent corn bread or mush, but not good enough to crave.

If the Ruby Queen sweet corn is only red in the pericarp, how much of the red nutrients will be present? It's considered important for human nutrition same as the color from blueberries, so that's one reason I want to grow red corn. (and please don't say Hickory King, some Hickory King some places is good, other places its tasteless. Hickory King is grown way too much and offered by too many seed companies). The Suntava is one avenue to gain those anthrocyanin nutrients, I hoped the Ruby Queen would be another avenue, but if the color is only in the pericarp as you say, maybe there wouldn't be much.

What would dried sweet corn, made into hominy be like? I don't know. I'm still experimenting. It took me more than 20 years to find a way to use a blue corn (appears to be the ancient variety Hopi Blue but ID not 100% sure). It was useless as cornmeal, finally I found it could be made into a superb hominy blue all the way through. Maybe that's where I should be looking for those blue colors, and forget Suntava and Ruby Queen.

[blueadzuki]

May 13, 2020 14:12:59 GMT -5 12540dumont said:

I have a jar of dried ground sweet corn. Does not make for good bread or polenta. What's it good for? It's too sweet for anything savory.

A lot of Native and Latin American communities used dried sweet corn to make pinole (link) I also imagine it has uses if you are making corn beer (you probably get different results than you do using a starchy corn, but I'm sure someone does it.)

[massachusettsgrower]

Thanks everyone for your comments.

Sandhill Preservation offers many traditional OP sweet corns, and Glenn on there has something to say about using traditional sweet corns:

"Old fashioned non-hybrid sweet corns do not have the high sugar content of the modern super sweets, but they do have a true corn flavor and are nice and sweet when eaten soon after picking. They do not have the sugar enhancer gene or other genes that allow them to get sweeter the longer they are stored. They should only be tried on a limited basis if you are not familiar with the old fashioned flavor... We are excited that we will continue to bring back more old fashioned heirloom sweet corns and we are working on a few others of our own breeding. We decided to take pictures of mature ears and not when they are young and tender to show the degree of sweetness each has. The more shriveled the kernels the sweeter the corn. Many are excellent ground and used for cornbread that is superb."

And that's Glenn said.

[steev]

That's what I like about Golden Bantam; it tastes like corn.

[12540dumont]

I have had many seeds from Glenn and chickens too! Love his chickens. Bears will eat anything if hungry enough. (I'm from MN...where bears wake up hungry).
What I will say about this type of sweet corn, if you are planting 75 seeds of this, it will all come ripe at the same time and doesn't hold long after picking.
We had that same issue with Buhl.

[DarJones]

I have 3 rows across the garden of the Cherokee Squaw X High Protein corn. Each row has about 90 hills with 2 plants per hill. I fertilized and weeded it today. The plants are about 1 foot tall. This corn is deliberately planted late to avoid crossing with the fields of corn growing in the area. I have 2 hills of Nalo Orange which should tassel at the right time to make a cross.