How To Use A Slice Of Bread As An Easy Tool To Butter An Ear Of Corn

Why you should butter corn with bread

While we prefer to keep our butter on the counter for easy spreading at room temperature, many people opt to store it in the fridge. If you belong to the refrigerator-butter camp, using a piece of warm, fresh bread to apply the butter to your corn can add just enough heat to help it melt instead of cooling down the vegetable. The softer the butter, the easier it spreads, too.

For those passionate home cooks who believe in using a different utensil for every dish, buttering corn with bread means fewer knives to clean. This may not make a significant difference for couples dining together, but it can save a minute or two during a busy corn-season gathering. There's also the slight chance, whether real or imagined, that the flavors of each item could blend; it’s not entirely unlikely that some of the corn's sweetness might transfer to the bread. Additionally, the salt already mixed into your butter provides a smoother texture on the corn compared to a few gritty shakes, or you could opt for compound butter to introduce even more flavors. In any case, there’s always the joy of doing something a bit unconventional and pretending you’ve been doing it forever, like grilling bacon-wrapped corn on the cob.