Drying Bloody Butcher Seed Corn

This year in addition to planting a couple of varieties of heirloom sweet corn we planted a new variety of field corn or dent corn.  Field corn is not as sweet as sweet corn and is primarily used for making cornmeal, grits, flour, or for roasting.  Bloody Butcher Corn has a very colorful name due to the color of the kernels, resembling blood.  In reading about its origins, it came about in the 1800's when corn from the Indians mixed with the early settler's seed corn.

I had obtained the seeds from a seed exchange at a sustainable agriculture conference, so I didn't have very many to plant.  I decided to try growing some and if they produced, I could dry it and save the seed for next year.  I was thinking that it would be really neat to grow plenty of this next year, grind it for corn meal or grits.  It would be pretty cool to have a reddish-pink bowl of grits.  In reading about it, I learned that it has a great corn flavor, not to mention the ornamental aspects.

So rather than picking this corn when it is ripe like we would with sweet corn, we leave this on the stalks to dry.  The stalk will turn brown and die and some of the drying ears will turn downward. The husks serve as a form of protection from the weather and from birds, but when I noticed ants climbing up the stalks, I figured I had better pick them and bring them to the back patio for further drying.

Drying Corn Stalks

I peeled back the husks, removed the silk and placed them on a table on the patio to allow the corn to dry further.  I'm thinking that I'll hang it to let it dry further, but I haven't quite gotten around to that yet.

Getting Bloody Butcher seed corn ready to dry further

The corn is very pretty.  I noticed that I had some damage to some of the kernels from ants, but if I can successfully dry what I have, I'll have enough for a nice inventory of seed corn for next Spring. The photo below shows why its also called dent corn.  Can you see the 'dent' on the top of each kernel?

This corn is nowhere near dry yet.  You are supposed to allow it to dry between 60 and 90 days.  Due to our humidity, I'll likely allow it to dry for at least 90 days and possibly more.

Beautiful red color!

Once the corn is fully dry, if you twist the cob in your hand, the kernels will pop off with ease into a paper bag.  You can then store the seed corn in a jar until it is planting time.  We'll update you in November and report if our Bloody Butcher seed saving experiment was successful or not.

One note: We did eat one cob of Bloody Butcher corn just to see what it tasted like. Obviously, it wasn't sweet, but it had a rich, nice taste to it, and I bet it will make some fantastic tasting grits!