Corn Smuttiness
Huitlacoche. Corn-Smut. Black Gold. The Mexican Truffle. It goes by many names, all nearly as mysterious as its unmistakable appearance.
Huitlacoche is the bluish-grey alien-looking growth, which commonly infects ears of corn, engorging the kernels until they appear soft, bloated and unrecognizable from their familiar and much-loved yellow and buttered host. Unsurprisingly, the standard agricultural practice in the U.S. has been to destroy the infected corn stalks, presumably for fear of the disease spreading. In Mexico however, Huitlacoche has long been considered a delicacy, at least since the days of the Aztecs, whose name for the growth roughly translates to raven excrement. When cooked, the cartoonishly bulbous growths take on an even less conventionally appetizing appearance, becoming slimy, tar-like, and changing from a powdery azure-grey to a deep shiny brownish-black.
Despite its pervasiveness as a naturally occurring growth in US sweet corn crops, it remains nearly impossible to find as a freshly harvested food product. In Mexico it is easily found, sold fresh in both markets and food stalls where it’s commonly stuffed into quesadillas along with melted salty, rubbery cheese. The taste is difficult to describe, complex, vaguely corn-like and undeniably—if ambiguously—fungal.
Food science wiz and writer Harold McGee goes into greater depth in his landmark book, Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, which describes Huitlacoche as having a “sweet, savory, woody flavor,” which he attributes to the presence of glucose, sotolon and vanillin. Glucose is a chemical we associate with sweetness. Vanillin, as one could easily guess, is the main flavor component in vanilla, and sotolon is a strong aroma compound found in maple syrup, curry, fenugreek, molasses, aged rum, aged sake, roast tobacco, and the mildly toxic milk-cap mushroom (lactarius helvus). Stuff all those flavors and smells into a corny fungal smudge of irregularly shaped black slime and you have Huitlacoche. Well not exactly, but it is easy to understand why it’s an acquired taste and also a historically longstanding delicacy, at least in one part of the world. There you have it: one people’s plant-disease is another people’s plant delicacy. Hopefully we will be seeing the fresh stuff in U.S. markets in the future, but until then use your imagination, ask around for it, or move to Mexico.
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