70. The Corn-icles of Summer, Part I
First, how to find gold.
At some point around the middle of July, our green bin becomes significantly harder to haul to the curb on garbage day. And our front step is often festooned with silky strands. Once the sign, “Local corn now available” appears at Fiesta Farms, our household corn consumption springs to life after 10 months of hibernation and corn becomes a near-constant feature at dinner.1 Mostly it’s eaten straight from the cob with just butter and salt,2 sweet, juicy, with kernels that pop under the slightest tooth pressure. Like oysters and asparagus, I don’t often feel the need to complicate corn. “Just let it be itself,” I say as I consider some more involved preparation, “It doesn’t get better than that.”3
If it’s good, that is. Subpar corn, like subpar anything, doesn’t shine on its own. Leathery, starchy kernels with little to no flavour need something to hide behind.
But how do you consistently a) find a good corn supply, b) choose good ears, and c) let it be itself? In this three-part series, I’ll take you through each step.
First up, finding your supply.
“But wait,” you might ask, “Why should we listen to you?” You want my corn-dentials? I married into them. Beth grew up in the corn country right outside of Windsor.
She had one summer job detasseling corn and another cooking and selling it at Cornland Corner,4 Essex County’s beloved (and since 2012, mourned) institution. Beth. Knows. Corn. Our entire relationship has been my education in corn. Satisfied? Good. Let’s get back to the task at hand.
There’s a hierarchy for where to buy corn in season. From absolutely avoid it to what should be your first choice. It is:
A supermarket with that only has peeled and cello-wrapped ears. Never this. The corn is old. When an ear of corn is picked, it is cut off from the main plant’s sugar supply and it starts converting its own sugar to starch. It will not be good. And you can’t touch it to evaluate it either. (More on this in the next installment.) Do not buy this.
A supermarket with sealed mesh bags of loose, unhusked5 ears. You still can’t do much evaluating, but at least by keeping them unhusked, the kernels aren’t exposed to the air, causing them to lose moisture.6
A supermarket with piles of loose, unhusked corn.7 This should be your everyday go-to. You’re free to evaluate and you can choose as many as you actually need which, for a two-person household, is important.
A roadside corn stand with prebagged, unhusked corn. Almost certainly fresher than what you can get at a supermarket, but not being able to choose your own is a point against.
A roadside corn stand that lets you choose your own. Heaven. The best of everything.
Beth and I have a tradition we’ve been observing since the summer of 2023, when a bout of profound restlessness after finishing yet another tiresome self-quarantine got us on the road: drive to Newmarket, a town just north of Toronto.8 There, we thrift at Value Village. Stop at Kawartha Dairy, maker of one of Ontario’s best-loved ice creams. Look for deals at the Newmarket location of The Grocery Outlet, part of a small chain of grocery liquidators that have overstock or soon-to-expire products at deep discounts.9 Finally, stop at the roadside corn stand just south of Newmarket on the way home to pick up some ears for dinner. A bit of a trek, but it was the closest corn stand to our house.
Or so I thought. Just now, as I typed that sentence, I realized I was making a huge assumption. I am going to step away for a moment and do some research.
I’m back and I can now say that I was dead wrong. There are at least five other places ranging from a shack at the side of the road to farm markets10 carrying all kinds of produce and specialty items like preserves and baked goods, all within the 43 kilometres we have been been driving. One even has at least five satellite stands, supplied fresh each day.
(For a map of all the places mentioned in this issue, click here.)
Carter’s Corn or, on Google Maps, “York Region’s Finest Corn”
$6 for 6 or $12 for 13
Our OG. Located on the west side of Bathurst just south of Newmarket, it’s just a pickup truck and a table at the mouth of what I assume (at my peril at this point) is the driveway of the farm where the corn is grown.
It’s pre-bagged but always very fresh. We’ve never had a problem before with not being able to choose our own, but this year a lot of the ears were picked too early. Skinny cobs. Underdeveloped kernels. Some were terrific, but others were scrawny. We bought them on August 1, which is a bit early for corn grown this far north. I’m sure in a week or two everything will have plumped right up.
Sweet Ridge Farms
Starting at $1/ear, with deals for larger quantities
At the very northeast corner of Scarborough you’ll find the only other true corn stand on this list. It’s just a simple building beside the last working farm within the city of Toronto. Go there early. We arrived around 3:3011 and they were almost completely cleaned out for the day. All that remained were very skinny ears, save for a couple of fatties the person running the till rustled up for me.
Sweet Ridge also has six stands scattered throughout non-rural Scarborough (and possibly one in Whitchurch-Stouffville I haven’t yet confirmed is still there) that it supplies daily with just-picked corn. If I lived in the east end of the city, I would be there multiple times per week.
The stand is at the northern end of Beare Rd, which longtime (and unsettlingly attentive) Plate Cleaner readers will recognize as the same road that Julie’s Homemade Butter Tarts, a stand I wrote about in 2024’s, “55. Pastry at the Edge of Town,” is on. I had seen online recently that the wonderful and nearby Rouge Park Pie Stand12 had either closed permanently or moved, so we drove one road over to check. The stand was empty and the signs were gone. A neighbour who was just pulling out of her driveway next door told me that Glen Barkey, the man behind the stand, had passed away earlier in the year. “No more pies,” she added before driving away.
From there, we drove north for about 15 minutes to pick up a few more ears.
Reesor’s Farm Store
Starting at $1.25/ear, with deals for larger quantities
Starting in 1985 as a wagon selling corn and pumpkins on the side of 19th Line, Ressor’s13 is now a compound. Beside corn, they’ve got many more locally grown fruits and vegetables, baked goods, prepared meals, frozen meats, preserves and more, plus pick-your-own fields. and greenhouse yoga. This operation is on a different scale that Sweet Ridge’s so there were many more ears left, despite our fairly late arrival.
At dinner that night it was a split decision: Beth preferred Reesor’s and I preferred Sweet Ridge but both were very good. Sweet and juicy with kernels that pop as you bite into them. I would be very happy with either.
The following day, I flew solo to investigate the three remaining places on my list, all a 5 to 10 minute drive apart in King City and Woodbridge, northwest of Toronto.
Sandy’s Farm
Starting at $0.75/ear, with deals for larger quantities
Like Reesor’s, Sandy’s is definitely at the upper limit of what could be called a farm market. It’s a full-scale operation with a large, permanent building and a fleet of equipment milling about constantly. The parking lot is huge. Inside, there are many different kinds of produce available. Sandy’s is big enough to have multiple varietals of things14 like chile peppers and lettuce, something I didn’t see anywhere else.
The corn was the best price I’d seen anywhere, but I had my concerns when selecting ones to buy. (I’ll get into that in Part II.) And, as expected when I got it home, it was underwhelming. Not much flavour and I suspect it hadn’t been picked that day.
Robintide Farm
Starting at $1.25/ear, with deals for larger quantities
A five-minute drive down the road from Sandy’s, Robintide Farm puts us firmly back into the farm market world with a very large, very wedding-coded tent acting as the market building.
There’s a decent selection of vegetables and a few other farm products. Judging from their website and the size of their parking lot, Robintide’s main focus is on farm experiences like pick-your-own berries, flowers, etc as well as a sunflower field and a pumpkin patch.
The corn was fine. Like Sandy’s, it wasn’t packed with flavour or sweetness. It looked like it would be very good but didn’t quite live up to that promise.
Round the Bend Farm
Starting at $1/ear, with deals for larger quantities
It calls itself “a working family farm,” but it’s clear that Round the Bend also has a lot of experiential programming to go with what they produce. The website mentions booking for summer camps, farm visits, and school tours as well as signing up for their CSA.15 Inside the market building there are the usual farm market offerings. Veg like carrots, beets, potatoes, tomatoes, and leafy greens. Preserves. Baked goods. And corn.
Round the Bend’s corn had the most corn-forward flavour of any I’d tasted on either trip. So much modern, bi-colour corn focuses on sweetness over anything else. Blindfolded, I would have believed it if you told me this was old-fashioned single-colour corn. There was definitely some sweetness, but it didn’t overwhelm the deep down corn flavour.
I would definitely come here again, even though it’s just about as far from our house as Carter’s, the original roadside stand we’ve been buying from. The drive home, however, takes me right past Ciao Roma, my favourite place for Roman pizza al taglio, which adds another point to the “pro” column.
At this point, I should emphasize that I’m evaluating the corn from all of these places based on one ear bought on one day and eaten by one person. As in the mustard tasting, my goal is not to pit local businesses against each other. Everywhere I went had its strengths and is worthy of a visit. With many being so close to each other, you can pick and choose what you want from each one. And once you’ve read Part II, you’ll be able to decide for yourself which one you should be getting your corn from.
Surely there are more than the six I’ve listed here. If you’ve got a corn source in the GTA that I should know about, leave it in the comments so I can add it to the map.
Similarly, once it’s tomato season (aka BLT season) again, our mayonnaise consumption spikes.
Or, even better, sea-salted butter. Or this, if you have the means.
Leftover corn is a different matter entirely. Yesterday I had a very tasty (and novel to me) corn omelette. (I cut the kernels off the cob; I didn’t just wrap the omelette around the cob.)
I visited her in Essex the summer of our first year together. She wasn’t working at Cornland Corner, but she took me there. Even the best ear I’ve had since then has been inferior to the ears I had there.
As in, “corn still in its husk,” not “dehusked” or “shucked” corn, which has had it removed.
If you’re in Southern Ontario, bags of Welsh Brothers corn are almost always a good bet. As is their asparagus, according to one of the Ontario Food Terminal’s most legendary buyers. Here’s a somewhat complete map of where you can find their products, although Fiesta often has them and Lady York Foods has their corn on the front of their flyer as of this writing.
Trust me, we will get into my thoughts about the bins of removed husks supermarkets have. Because I have thoughts.
It turns out it was not quite as “just north” of Toronto as it was in my head. Only when my navigation app said, “Go straight for 28 kilometres,” did I realize it was actually more like a bit north of Toronto.
Rest assured, nothing is slimy or gross. It’s not Al Peck’s Used Fruit.
And I once found very marked-down Cascatelli! I cleaned them out.
For the purposes of this article, I’m defining a corn stand as a simple location that only sells one or two things. A farm market is larger and sells more things, but is located on the farm where, presumably, a large portion of them is grown. Anything bigger or located off-site didn’t make the cut.
I realize that “arrive early” and “arrive before 3:30” are not the same thing. I had been writing up a version of this issue that was just about our go-to corn stand when I had my realization that just maybe it wasn’t the closest one to us. That was around 1:30. Between research, realizing that I should take advantage of a long weekend, and getting there as soon as I could added up to a couple of hours.
Way to be two years late to the party, Toronto Life.
This part of Markham/Scarborough is lousy with Reesors. John and Emma Reesor own the Farm Market. Dale Reesor owns Sweet Ridge Farms. And Reesor Rd is in between, running parallel to the market’s 19th line and Sweet Ridge’s Beare Rd.
Other than potatoes. Most stands/markets have several kinds of potatoes.
I talked about the CSA I’m a part of last issue.