Homegrown, Homecanned Creamed Corn

I made my first ever creamed corn from the abundance of sweet corn in my garden this year.  I'd be lying if I said I wasn't intimidated by the idea of tackling a new canning project.  Beans, no problem.  Tomatoes, easy as pie.  Dill pickles, in my sleep.  But corn?!?  For some reason, corn just seemed like an insurmountable task.

In reality, it wasn't.  Oh my goodness, it was so easy.  So, so easy.  Not fast, because I had to pick, shuck, and then get the kernels off dozens of ears of corn, but it was definitely easy.  I fear canning corn no more.  I look forward to many more years of canning corn.

Here's what I did, after picking and shucking those ears.

I tried to get as much of the silks off as possible.  Then, I rinsed each ear in cool water.  From there, one by one, the ears went to a cutting board, where I first stood the ear on it's wide end, and cut off the tips of the kernels with a sharp paring knife.

Then, after going around the entire ear of corn and cutting off the tips of the kernels, I grabbed a tablespoon and used it to scrape out the pulp from inside each kernel.  This was pretty quick.

After every two or three ears of corn done this way, I dumped the pile of corn tips and pulp (and milky juice) into a large bowl. It didn't take long to have rather a large amount of 'creamed corn.'

From there, I ladled the corn and pulp and juice into hot canning jars and added 1/2 tsp salt to each one.  The canning book says you can also top off to 1" head space with boiling water, but I found that my corn was juicy enough it didn't seem to need added water.  And I was afraid of ending up with the really runny creamed corn that you seem to get whenever you buy it at the grocery store in the past five years or so.

I put 2 quarts of boiling water into the bottom of my pressure canner (as per the manufacturer's directions), set the hot, full, capped jars into the canner, put the cover on, and away we went.  At least, that's how I feel whenever I seal the pressure canner lid; I'm often heard saying "and away we go" as I turn the burner to high.

After the canner got up to 10 pounds pressure, it took 1 hr 35 minutes processing time until I was able to shut the canner off.  Once pressure dropped to zero, I removed the weight, carefully opened the lid, and took my very hot jars of cream corn out.  They were set on a dry towel (very important) on the island to cool for at least 12 hours.

After that, I did whole kernel corn for the first time.  That will be in my next post.