Recipe File: Corn Fritters

A couple weeks ago, Tina and I had dinner at the E&O Trading Company in San Jose, CA. We found the restaurant to be a noisy, up-scale, Southeast Asian fusion restaurant that did not serve exceptional food. (Most of the food was high quality and very tasty, but you can get similar meals at a Thai or Malaysian restaurant for a third of the price.) One dish that did stand out was their Indonesian Corn Fritters which was served with a spicy soy sauce. I decided to make this dish at home for about a dollar.

I place a piece of shelf liner under my cutting board to keep it from moving. I prefer this to a wet towel.


Cut the kernels off the corn a few rows at a time. We're trying to preserve the kernals, so cut a little deep. Run the back of the knife or your board scraper against the cob to extract the remaining bits of corn.


We're looking for about 2-1/2 cup of corn. Canned sweet corn that's been drained will also work fine.


We'll also need (from top left, clockwise), two large egg yolks, two large egg whites, 1 tablespoon granulated sugar, 1/4 teaspoon salt, 1/8 teaspoon pepper, and 2 tablespoons all purpose flour.


Beat the egg whites in a large bowl with a whisk. You can also use your stand mixer or hand mixer with a whisk attachment. I placed the bowl on a piece of shelf liner to keep it from moving. A towel rolled and twisted into a donut also works well.


You're done beating the egg whites once you achieve stiff peaks. Just dab your whisk into the whites and lift. If the egg white form points that don't droop down, then you've got stiff peaks. (If they droop then it's called soft peaks.) Stop whisking now, or you'll dry out the egg whites.


Lightly beat the egg yolk and then mix into the corn.


Add flour, salt, pepper, and sugar and mix.


Fold in the egg whites into the corn mixture.


This is what the final mixture looks like.


After melting 2 tablespoons of butter in a nonstick skillet (which you'll notice I'm not using in this picture because I didn't have one handy), place tablepoon sized heaps into the hot butter. You can also use oil instead of butter, which I did for half of my fritters because Tina prefers to not have the butter taste with her corn. (I, of course, used light olive oil.)


Once they browned, about 2 to 3 minutes, I flipped them over and browned the other side.


A larger pan would have helped speed things up, but I still managed to make about sixteen fritters fairly quickly. A fashioned a quick sauce out of Shiriachi chili sauce, soy sauce, and sugar. I also made the fritters with varying degrees of brownness and determined that dark or light brown did not have adverse affects on taste.


Corn Fritters
Batter:

2-1/2 cup sweet corn kernels	mix	mix	fold
2 large egg yolks
1 Tbs. sugar
1/4 tsp. salt
1/8 tsp. pepper
2 Tbs. all purpose flour
2 large egg whites	beat (stiff peaks)

2 Tbs. butter or oil	heat	fry 2-3 min. per side
1 Tbs. mixture