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As an old man not on TikTok, I first saw corn ribs on the Instagram page of a favorite restaurant a few weeks ago when I introduced the grilled corn ribs as the “newest drink”. Only a few days later, another gram came into my feed from a restaurant that called its corn ribs fried in black garlic butter and coated with cheese as a real “summer cracker”. And just yesterday, the Momofuku Ssam Bar team claimed the technique, noting that they were serving corn ribs for the first time back in 2017 when they were deep-fried and plated along with squid aioli. (In an October 2017 review, New York Times’s Pete Wells called it “one of the most original corn dishes I’ve seen in a long time.”) Austin Restaurant Hai Hai Ramen put in the comments to be noted A version known simply as sweet corn has been served since 2016. Corn ribs – basically a long strip of kernels of corn with a silver cob attached to glue them all together – are suddenly and inexplicably everywhere. But why??
I’m not asking for the literal why: the answer to that is clear, and obviously TikTok, the platform that spawns a new food trend every other day, from that viral feta pasta of winter 2021 to earlier this week, the trend, frozen Eating honey (to the detriment of the digestive system). Corn ribs first started trending on the platform in February of this year, and their current ubiquity is likely related to the summer season of corn.
I ask about them in a more spiritual sense: why bother? As many recipe testers point out elsewhere – and as seen in TikToker’s original Farrah J video – cutting a corn cob in half seems dangerous; It doesn’t require knife skills as much as the muscles required to force your knife through a cob of corn. When you eat the ribs, the cob is still attached, so you have to eat the kernels off the cob like a normal ear – it doesn’t save time. Lots of recipes call for sauce or cheese or other toppings to be poured over the ribs, and the ribs don’t even have the nice, clean ends of a plunger to hold onto, so your hands just get messy that way. And to be honest, the curved rib shape seems annoying (a piston is nice and straight! Why “fix” that!).
To be clear, I would definitely eat a corn rib with it in front of me and I will probably enjoy it. I love corn, especially the Elote style and with a hint of the grill that still lingers; I love the job of gnawing my ears like a vegetarian caveman, but I also respect it when you saw off the kernels in one fell swoop (shouts to anyone who has ever had braces). Maybe it’s just that a cooked corn on the cob itself doesn’t need improvement. Maybe (probably!) I’m thinking too much. But it doesn’t stop there that every time a corn rib lands on my Instagram feed, my immediate and visceral reason is: why ??
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