Side dishes · Vegetable sides
Corn on the cob
Summer's simplest side, timed right: sweet corn boiled a bare few minutes and rolled in butter and salt. The recipe is mostly about what not to do — which is more.
- Time
- 10 min (5 prep + 5 cook)
- Servings
- 4
- Per serving
- 181 kcal
- Protein
- 4 g
Both directions are legitimate — the score measures fullness per calorie, not virtue. Every version is the same dish, rebalanced.
Ingredients
- 4 ears' worth sweet corn, husked ears600 g
- 2 tbsp butter30 g
- 1/2 tsp, flaky salt3 g
- to taste black pepper1 g
Every ingredient links to its food page — same data, same score, same formula.
Steps
- Bring a big pot of water to a rolling boil. Don't salt it — salt toughens corn skins; the salt comes later.
- Drop in the ears for 3–5 minutes. Fresh sweet corn is nearly edible raw; boiling past five minutes only takes things away.
- Out, drained, buttered while steaming so it melts into the rows.
- Salt and pepper at the table, over a plate, generously.
Grill instead?
Yes — husk on, 15 minutes turning occasionally, and the kernels steam in their own wrapper; or husk off directly over the flame for char. Char adds what boiling can't, and costs nothing.
Why this score
moderately fillingNo single route carries this one — a moderate amount of protein, volume and fiber.
Three routes to fullness — one is enough
What pulls it down
Computed on the finished dish, not an average of the parts: 725 kcal goes into the pot, 634 g of ingredients comes out as ~650 g of food → 112 kcal per 100 g. Cooking moves water, and energy density is the score's biggest lever — so we show the math. Full formula here.
Per
- Calories
- 112
- Protein
- (9%)
- 3 g
- Fat
- (42%)
- 5 g
- Carbohydrates
- (49%)
- 14 g
- of which sugar
- 7 g
- Fiber
- 2 g
- Sodium
- 209 mg
Percentages are the share of calories from each macronutrient.
Computed from the ingredients' USDA data — nothing typed by hand. Every number is traceable, every score recomputable.
More side dishes
Photo: AI-generated. Nutrition and score are computed from the ingredients with the published formula — this recipe hasn't been kitchen-tested by us yet.