A Large Little Recipe has the smallest-possible ingredient checklist and massive every thing else: taste, creativity, wow issue. Psst—we do not rely water, salt, black pepper, and sure fat (particularly, half cup or much less of olive oil, vegetable oil, and butter), since we’re guessing you have got these coated. At this time, we’re making a buttery corn salad within the blink of a watch.

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Seven years in the past, nearly to the day, our co-founder Amanda Hesser advised us about brown butter tomatoes—a recipe so easy, you may make it as soon as, then comprehend it inside-out, the identical method you recognize the alphabet or your finest good friend’s telephone quantity.

“The tomatoes and butter collectively are mysteriously, deliciously harking back to lobster with melted butter,” Amanda wrote. “The richness. The candy, tender flesh. The beautiful burst of summer time.”

That is the kind of factor I can’t cease occupied with.

Should you take a ripe, peak-season ingredient, how a lot do you have to futz with it? And at what level does the futzing truly make it worse?

Within the case of tomatoes, we all know that you simply want not more than flaky salt, possibly with a spoonful of brown butter or plop of aioli. After all, you may pile tomatoes in a tart with lemony mascarpone and drizzle the entire thing with basil oil, and this may be fantastic. However the vital factor is to know that you simply don’t have to.

The identical is true with corn. By the point the summer time is so scorching and humid you nearly want it have been fall, corn is as candy as a peach, with the snappy-juicy chew of a cucumber. I need to eat it day-after-day and, some weeks, I almost do.

I grill it and make salads. I char it in a skillet and add pasta. I steep it in custard and churn ice cream.

However on an particularly sweaty, sleepy night time, the very best factor to do is just not cook dinner it in any respect.

Simply use your sharpest knife to strip the kernels from the cob, toss them with minced chives—tender and grassy, they style like onions earlier than onions realized that life is difficult—and a pinch of salt. (Then yet another pinch for good measure.)

Add a hunk of butter and a few Fresno chile slivers to a skillet. A Fresno chile’s spiciness is on-par with a jalapeño, however the taste is riper and fruitier and, for those who ask me, higher. Because the chiles crisp, the butter browns, they usually each grow to be brighter and extra scrumptious.

Proper earlier than the butter burns, pour it everywhere in the uncooked corn. Now, that is the vital half: Stir, so every kernel is dressed to the nines, then eat instantly. The butter ought to be heat and melty, like popcorn on the movie show.

When you begin brown-buttering recent substances—Amanda has tried this with raspberries, too—I’ve a hunch that you simply’ll discover it onerous to cease. And it is a good factor. There are nonetheless weeks of summer time left.

What’s the simplest corn recipe you recognize? Inform me about it within the feedback!