Taco Tuesday: Mexican Street Corn and Scallops

this edition of Taco Tuesday is end-of-summer perfection and for me that means grilled corn just like they do in Mexico the street vendors that grill the corn on the cob over charcoal fire usually a mesquite fire and then they slather it with mayonnaise in the olden days when I lived there they still use crema to do that with put some chili on it and some cheese like queso Anejo and that bite is so perfectly end-of-summer for me that I wanted to capture that in a tortilla for the end of summer perfect taco okay so we're gonna do the corn we're gonna add some scallops to it I've already cut some corn off the cob this is corn that came from our farmers market we'll talk a little bit more about that and I'm gonna put it onto a cast-iron skillet that I have dry here there it's just been heating and it's pretty hot I'm gonna put it dry in here because that's gonna give me a little bit of that flavor and texture of the grilled corn on the cob and right next to it I'm going to put the scallops the scallops are gonna need a little bit of oil and putting the my favorite Baja olive oil on here some salt these are base calop so they're the small ones and I'm gonna after coating them nicely now by the way I dried these scallops off completely so that they don't have a lot of moisture on them and that will go on this side of my skillet here now we're gonna let those cook let the corn sort of star because remember it doesn't have any oil on it at all and let's talk corn now so most places in the United States you can find corn in the farmers market because we all love two things in the farmers market are the big sellers corn and tomatoes okay so this is coin from out one of our local farms this comes from one that's called three sisters garden tracy vowel is the farmer and she was the chef here she was our chef de cuisine for many years here and then she transitioned over into being a farmer she's growing a beautiful bicolored super sweet corn now the popping that you're hearing going on over here is sort of like popping sweet corn cut off the cob because remember that there is there's no oil in it but I'm gonna give it a little stir here just to make sure that it doesn't burn but we get some nice char on it it's it's looking so good already it's reminding me so much of what I love about the grilled corn on the cob okay so let's go back to corn now she's growing the super sweet bicolored corn it has been genetically well let's see selected this is not GMO corn this is just selected to be a really sweet corn and that once you pick it off of the plant you don't lose sweetness when I was a kid you had to rush straight from the field over to the pot of boiling water if you wanted your sweet corn to be sweet but nowadays this stuff will stay sweet even in your refrigerator now there are several different ways that you can use to attack the corn cutting it off you can stand it up like this and go straight down you usually end up with a lot of corn kernels on the floor that way another way to do it is to just cut it like that and just keep turning it until you've cut everything off of it now you might want to go back here and cut a few kernels off at the top where you weren't able to get it cutting straight down okay some people like to go through more popping going on there and scrape this out that's really more important if you're gonna make a chowder out of it in my way of thinking okay so let's go back and look at what we've got here in the skillet these scallops are about half cooked now these are I chose the bay scallops rather than the sea scallops because I wanted to make sure that they would cook in about the same amount time as my corn which would be about three minutes or so and they're actually just about done now okay see the char that we've got going on the on the corn here okay so I'm gonna pick up this heavy skillet this is a an old cast-iron skillet that we use here at our restaurant I've got some more at my house I'm gonna take everything now into a bowl to give it its final seasoning that you can see that this thing goes incredibly fast and now I'm gonna put in the mayonnaise this is the mayonnaise that you would buy in the Mexican grocery store you could use any kind of mayonnaise for this but this one has lime juice in it so we'll take a spoonful of mayonnaise of course feel free if it's your thing to make your own homemade mayonnaise but then please make it with lime juice in it so that it has that beautiful Mexican flavor to it and you can see that the mayonnaise will just melt and become like a sauce for this okay next thing is to grab the tortillas for this and we'll lay a couple of those here on the plate and scoop our seasoned mixture creamy beautiful seasoned mixture into the middle of the tortillas to make our tacos with we have a little stray scallop now the next things that we'll put on will be the Mexican cheese for this one I've chosen to go a little bit lighter not the queso and yangko which tastes more like parmesan but the fresh cheese queso fresco you could use farmer's cheese or goat cheese for this is a really good option I think cuz it's got a freshness now a little bit of chili over the top and if you want to make it look really beautiful which I typically do with my food I would take some cilantro sprigs and just lay them right over that like that and then give a freshness to it and that is really for me the epitome of summer flavor

Channel: Rick Bayless

Views: 19,390

Rating: 4.9425287 out of 5

Keywords: Rick Bayless, tacos, Mexican, Mexican corn, street corn, elotes, scallops, seafood, Taco Tuesday, corn, farmers market, vegetarian, recipes, dinner, cooking, kitchen, chef

Id: djRtB6GCt00

Length: 6min 48sec (408 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 23 2016