Corn is one of South Carolina’s top agricultural commodities, bringing in $290 million annually according to state data. That means big business for South Carolina and delicious produce on your plate.
Chefs and distillers do beautiful things with corn in Charleston.
To give you several tasty examples, we spoke with some of the city’s best about ways they celebrate this beloved summer vegetable.
Masa, corn and hominy
Corn is at the core of the Rancho Lewis menu at Pitmaster John Lewis’s spot in the Charleston Neck area. You’ll find it grilled on the “West Texas Wedge” salad and the crispy tortillas fish uses a house-milled tortilla batter and is topped with corn relish. Corn is also the foundation for the tortillas used in almost every dish. The restaurant’s corn program is in the hands of Executive Chef Isaac Watson and General Manager Patty Arredondo.
To create hominy, Watson soaks corn for a minimum of four hours in an alkaline solution to soften the kernels and make them easier to grind into masa. The team sources from Marsh Hen Mill, using heirloom varieties like Trucker Yellow and Jimmy Red. The masa is also used for the tortillas, and Rancho Lewis produces about 600 tortillas daily. On average, the team will grind 200 to 300 pounds of masa each day.
Hominy is the star of the show in Rancho Lewis’s vegetarian green chile pozole, a traditional Mexican stew.
“People don’t always realize that hominy starts as corn,” Lewis said. “Traditionally, it’s field corn that’s dried and then nixtamalized. It’s a centuries-old process where the kernels are cooked and soaked in an alkaline solution. That changes the texture, deepens the flavor and makes the nutrients more available.”
At sister restaurant Lewis Barbecue, you’ll find the green chili corn pudding, the restaurant’s most popular side. This dish is a marriage of Charleston and Lewis’s hometown of El Paso.
“I wanted to make something that felt Southern, but reflected where I come from,” he said. “Corn pudding is a classic southern comfort dish, and adding Hatch green chiles and cheese gives it a southwestern personality. We bake it until the edges get crispy and that idea actually came from Detroit-style pizza, where those caramelized edges are everyone’s favorite bite.”
From broth to brûlée
Executive Chef Micah Pearson has been making magic happen with local produce since taking over the kitchen at the Tippling House in 2024. As he told Charleston City Paper the following year, his cooking technique is “making vegetables fun.”
He most recently showcased corn broth in a dish with pan-seared tripletail (a firm, white, and flaky fish similar to red snapper and grouper), zucchini, corn broth and fennel oil.
Pearson makes an aromatized, savory stock using fennel and onion that he then finishes with his vegetable stock. Pro tip: Pearson adds turnips to his vegetable stock to give it more umami.
He said corn is not just for savory dishes, pointing to recently created a brûléed corn custard with strawberry preserves, creme fraiche and husk sugar.
“The idea around it was to make a fun dessert where I was going to use the entire corn,” Pearson said. “I turn the husk into sugar. I smoked it, dried it, ground it down and then mixed it with sugar so it was very fine, almost to the point where it was like powdered sugar. And then I take the cob, turn it into a stock with some warm spices to aromatize it and add some fresh Madagascar vanilla.”
He then purees this with the kernels and “custardizes” it with eggs and sugar, tempering it with a double boiler. Once served, it is topped with strawberry preserves and fresh mint grown on-site.
“Trying to do more with less makes me more creative,” Pearson said. “There are so many colors to paint with, but you don’t need every single color. You could really make magic with one if you really needed to.”
Corn in the bottle
Scott Blackwell and Ann Marshall founded High Wire Distilling Co. in 2013 with a goal to explore flavors found in lost or forgotten grains.
This quest is perhaps most notably seen in High Wire’s Jimmy Red straight bourbon whiskey. Jimmy Red was traditionally a moonshiner’s corn on James Island that found itself on the verge of extinction, the supply down to just two ears.
In early 2014, Glenn Roberts of Anson Mills was working to bring back the varietal and he gave Blackwell and Marshall enough Jimmy Red seed to grow 2.5 acres in partnership with Clemson University. During that first year, they harvested enough corn to distill two batches. Today, the annual corn yield is over 1.3 million pounds.
“Jimmy Red corn has nuanced layers of complex flavor that unfold in the fermentation, distillation and barrel aging process,” Marshall said. “The flavor inherent in Jimmy Red is driven largely by the colors red (cinnamic acid) and blue (anthocyanin) which contribute notes of baking spice, cinnamon, mace and tropical fruit. Jimmy Red also contains an exceptional amount of oil which translates to the distillate and contributes to the creamy mouthfeel of the bourbon.”
Marshall noted that since the beginning, she and Blackwell have relied on a group of research farmers to help create a scaling process for viable commercial pro duction of Jimmy Red.
“We barrel by farm, so every single barrel of Jimmy Red filled in our facility is labeled with a farm name indicating the provenance of the corn used in that batch,” Marshall explained. “What began as a great experiment has now become one of the most unique attributes of Jimmy Red bourbon. Place matters, and a trained palate can discern the differences in flavor from farm to farm and region to region. So many industry experts told us this would be impossible, and we’ve been delighted to prove them wrong.”
In the field
Emery Tumbleston’s family owns and operates Champneys Farm, the former blueberry operation off U.S. Highway 17 west of Charleston. She’s the youngest generation of growers on the farm, where her father first planted blueberries in 1995 when he worked for the Charleston Navy. Champneys opened to the public in 2004 when it was mainly a “you-pick” blueberry operation.
In 2023, the farm moved to Meggett. Blueberries take years to yield a marketable crop, and Tumbleston wanted to experiment with sweet corn as it’s a faster crop (the family had always planted a little corn for themselves). In 2025, she planted a third of an acre and this year, she planted an acre with drip irrigation.
“Corn is a crop where it’s pretty much all ready at one time,” Tumbleston said. “If you want corn for multiple weeks or multiple months, you have to stagger those plantings usually every 10 days to two weeks to get a constant harvest.”
She starts picking corn at 6 a.m., or as soon as she can see outside. With corn, Tumbleston explained, you want to pick it and cool it down as soon as possible. The warmer the corn is and the longer you wait to eat it, the higher the chance it will lose its sweetness and become starchy.
And when it comes to selecting corn, she has one very impassioned plea: do not get spooked by corn earworms.
“Corn earworms have to do with public perception,” Tumbleston said. “Corn earworms are a harmless, little thing. In my family, we have always cut the top of the corn off. I get pretty discouraged when I see people that just see a corn earworm on the top one inch of that ear and then don’t even give it a chance on the rest of that corn.
“You know the old saying was, ‘if there’s not a worm on it, I don’t want it.’ If there’s not a worm or animal that wants to eat it, chances are it doesn’t taste worth a dang and you don’t want to eat it.’ ”
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