Canned Corn Cachapas Pancakes

Like any normal person, when I wake up inconceivably early on a Saturday morning and can’t get back to sleep, I go through the Safari bookmarks on my phone to clean things up a bit. I often save random recipes I find on Reddit, stupid crap I wanted to buy but never did and an embarrassing amount of cat gifs. This particular morning of bookmark purging turned up this installment of savory pancakes. Cachapas. To the Spanish speakers, it’s simply a crumpet, but to me, it was an opportunity to use corn in a pancake recipe.

The recipe was enticing not only for the inclusion of corn, but for its simplicity. I already had all of the ingredients except for the corn and cheese. With a grocery shopping trip on the list of errands for the morning, I was pumped to get these salty batter babies in a pan and into my gullet ASAP…with minimal effort. Being a true ding dong, I purchased canned corn instead of going to the produce aisle and finding something not housed in sodium broth. Who knew corn on the cob was available in the produce section in May? I did not, but it would probably taste like cardboard anyway. At least cardboard is not reminiscent of a salt lick.

I get home and get every “goremay” chef’s most prized tool for fresh home-cooking — the can opener — pop that generic store brand cylinder of golden canned kernels open, hastily drain it and slap it into my food processor. It can’t be this easy can it? They have entire schools dedicated to this stuff? I’m ready for my casting call for Top Chef. Whatever, I still found a way to fuck it up, but it’s not my fault this time. I blame BuzzFeed.

I should have known adding a full tablespoon of salt to my salt-brined corn was absurd and I briefly contemplated the idea that it might be a mistake in the recipe glowing from my laptop screen. Surely they mean a teaspoon, right? But being the naive and inexperienced goremay chef, I opted to ignore common sense, toe the line and dump that entire fucking bucket of salt into the food processor. In go the rest of the ingredients, lid on. Giddy up.

I poured my yellow liquid salt into a bowl and get my pan heated, ready to drop batter, but not before the sizzling non-stick cooking spray releasing chemicals into my airspace offends my smoke alarm. I pour a half cup of batter into the pan and realize quickly that there’s way too much moisture in canned corn to properly form anything other than a puddle in my pan. I curse canned corn and my lackadaisical drainage while standing on my couch, fanning my smoke alarm with a kitchen towel.

Once the alarm subsided, I ran over and try to corral my corn puddle with a spatula. But even on high heat these things aren’t quite firming up like they should, or like the Internet promised. I was able to control the spreadage after a few minutes and form something resembling a panned cake, but had to accept they’d never live up to my expectations. I imagine it’s how my parents feel about how I turned out…writing about corn pancakes on the Internet and all.

But I digress. My little corn puddles firmed up enough to flip without completely falling apart, but barely. I topped them with cheese, let them finish up and folded them in half to transform them from puddles into pockets and got them plated. As is standard, I tried my hardest to class up my plating by adding some arugula with a drizzle of Valentina’s hot sauce.

First bite, salt. Second bite, salt. The rest of the bites, salt. But the sweetness from the corn was still there. The nuttiness of the arugula brought some Earthiness while the cheese brought the fat for full-figured flavor. If not for BuzzFeed’s completely unforgivable tablespoon typo, in addition to the extra moisture that came from using canned corn, these would be really fucking tasty. They were still pretty edible (by my standards) and since they’re extremely easy to make, they’ll stick around for rotation in my low-effort recipe collection.