The Silkiest Risotto

I was deep into recipe development for corn risotto when I started to wonder if the dish might be fundamentally flawed. There were hurdles to saturating the creamy rice with corn flavor that also seemed integral to risotto cookery. First, heat drives off many of the compounds we associate with the vegetable’s fresh, sweet taste. Second, chicken broth and wine obscure the flavor further. When I tried to overcome these challenges by adding handfuls of snappy peak-season kernels to the pot and infusing the rice with a concentrated broth I’d made by simmering the spent cobs, I failed to capture the vibrant, sweet corn flavor that is the raison d’etre of the whole dish.

Happily, it all worked out in the end, and even better than I thought it would. Because along with figuring out how to make risotto that’s suffused with the