Rice with Maize

The most important thing about cooking is to keep the juices flowing and there are no simple meals in the kitchen, even if it is such a supposedly archaic side dish as rice, in fact it's those dishes where true mastery shines through.

In the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi you see the apprentice Daisuke Nakazawa telling his story of preparing egg custards for hours a day, every day, for months, over 200 times, before Master Jiro Ono deemed it as acceptable and called him a Shokunin, a master of ones profession. Afterwards he opened his own restaurant and got awarded with four stars through The New York Times.

Another example is chef Dan Barber who serves in his restaurant dishes as simple as fresh carrots or radishes, albeit the taste is engineered through seed saving and cross-pollination on a genetic level.

So lets keep the dish simple today and I can assure you that I struggle more with those than with the more sophisticated ones :)

Serves 2

• 60 g sweetcorn kernels
• ½ T peanut oil
• 160 g white rice
• ½ l boiling water
• fine sea salt

In a water boiler bring the water to a boil. Strain the corn kernels.
Heat the peanut oil in a saucepan on medium and glaze the rice for one minute.

Then add the kernels.

Pour in the boiling water, mix and season with salt.
Cover, reduce the heat to small and let simmer for 20 minutes. There should be small holes visible on the surface.

Froth up with a spoon and serve.

Because of the sweet kernels and the salt augmenting the sweetness even more, the taste of the rice is interesting enough to be eaten on its own, I quite enjoyed it.

Bon appétit,
Miron