Apple Wood Smoked Corn on the Cob

I’m a big fan of cooking corn on the grill.  I’ve done it in the husk, in tin foil with butter/garlic/herbs, and I’ve done it naked.  The corn was naked, not me.  At the First Annual Grillin Fools Backyard BBQ Bash it was suggested to me that I smoke the corn by the Smoke N Pigs team, so I gave it a shot.

I took my standard corn basting butter from the naked corn post and used it here.

Ingredients:

1.3 sticks of salted butter
1 tsp of dried tarragon
1 tsp of dried oregano
1 tbsp of minced garlic

For a vegan meal, substitute an infused olive oil for the butter sauce.

This is enough for four ears of corn.

Combine the ingredients in a small sauce pan and melt the butter:

Next, set up the grill for indirect grilling. Charcoal on one side, nothing on the other. Preferably put the charcoal, and the subsequent smoke wood, on the side without the chimney (if your grill comes with one) so the smoke has to travel across the corn on its way out of the grill chamber.

Looking for a temperature between 275-300.  Once my temps leveled off, I added a couple chunks of apple wood to the coals.

Place the shucked corn on the side without the coals and brush with the butter/garlic/herb concoction. Rotate the corn 180 degrees every 15 minutes, slathering with the butter sauce each time.

This is the corn at 15 minutes.  It’s starting to brown nicely:

At 30 minutes, it has browned even more:

Time to hit it with more butter sauce:

At 60 minutes the corn looked like this and I served it:

Despite how dark the corn looked, after four different people tried it, the consensus was that it could’ve stayed on longer so the corn gets even crunchier and chewier. The darkest kernels were the best.

Give this a try to shake up the old stand by corn recipes. I will be doing this again very soon. Also, if you have any different herb combinations for the butter sauce, I’d love to hear them.  I’d also be willing to bet that using the kernels sliced off the cobs in other recipes could take those recipes to another level.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave a comment below or shoot me an email.

If you are interested in other vegetarian dishes, click here, or side dishes, click here.

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