No other country does bar food like South Korea.
Behind the Recipes
Korean Corn Cheese is the Gooiest Bar Snack
Bound with gobs of stretchy mozzarella and mayo, corn cheese is a perfect sidekick to beer and barbecue.
By and
Published June 4, 2024.
Alongside the cuisine’s robust drinking culture exists the equally rich tradition of crispy, creamy, chewy, salty, spicy anju (drinking snacks) for soaking up a night’s libations.
Depending on what’s being poured, these might include fried bites such as dakgangjeong (fried chicken) and the vast array of jeon (savory fritters); grilled meats like samgyeopsal (grilled pork belly); belly‑warming bowls of kimchi jjigae (kimchi stew) and jogaetang (clam soup); or gooey, stretchy corn cheese.
That last one is a dream for cheese-pull enthusiasts and anyone looking to throw together a low-fuss, crowd-pleasing snack or side dish. (Corn cheese is also a classic side dish with Korean barbecue.)
Toss corn kernels (traditionally canned) in a hot, butter‑slicked skillet with salt and a dash of sugar to enhance their sweetness and encourage flavorful browning. Stir in enough mayonnaise to coat the corn so that it’s lightly bound and creamy. Shower the pan with fistfuls of shredded mozzarella and slide it under the broiler until the cheese is molten and bubbly.
Sprinkle the top with thin-sliced scallions and serve it piping hot.
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The Complex Origins of Corn Cheese
Everything about corn cheese suggests a good time. Sunny yellow kernels bathed in butter and gobs of cheese and mayonnaise, it’s dreamy, endorphin‑fueling stuff that diners purposely pull apart in slow motion to show off its molten excess.
But all of that stands in stark contrast to the poverty-stricken landscape where Western provisions like these first entered Korean cooking around the time of the Korean War. Forced to rely on rations that were discarded or sold by the United States military, resourceful South Koreans adapted traditional preparations to include items such as canned corn, mayonnaise, Spam, and hot dogs. (Mozzarella entered South Korea toward the end of the 20th century.) Many of those foods and adaptations became woven into the cuisine over time, spawning now-iconic Korean dishes such as budae jjigae (army stew) and corn cheese.
Nowadays, the presence of Western ingredients in Korean cooking can elicit a range of emotions. “For older people, their feelings about the foods probably reflect their feelings about American involvement in the war, which can be a mix of gratitude, anger, humiliation, and grief,” said Grace M. Cho, professor of sociology at the City University of New York and author of books including Tastes Like War: A Memoir (2021).
But “for the younger generations who have no memory of the war or of South Korea as a poor country, I don’t think there’s much consciousness about the dark history of these food items,” said Cho.
In fact, corn cheese has inspired offshoots. Eric Kim, New York Times food columnist and author of Korean American: Food That Tastes Like Home (2022), has such affection for the dish’s combination of mayonnaise and mozzarella that he applies it to his everyday cooking.
“My go-to grilled cheese is mayo on the inside and mozzarella,” said Kim, noting that “the way mayo and cheese melt together is very specific.” Similarly, he adds a little mayo to the Mac and Corn Cheese recipe in his cookbook. “It reminds me of Midwestern cheesy casseroles,” he said.
The Corn and the Cheese
The sweetness of canned corn (which was likely introduced to Korea via the United States military around the time of the Korean War) is relatively consistent, so I stirred in just 11/2 teaspoons of sugar plus a little salt for two cans’ worth. (Fresh and frozen corn work well too.)
Then I grabbed a cast-iron skillet (its exceptional heat retention would keep the cheese-laden dip hot and gooey longer than stainless steel) and sautéed the kernels in butter until the pan was nearly dry and a light fond started to form around the edges. Off the heat, I stirred in mayonnaise and considered what type of mozzarella to use and how to incorporate it.
The Gooey Perks of Preshredded Mozzarella
Mozzarella is one of the great melting cheeses, particularly block mozzarella made from whole milk. Ounce for ounce, it’s richer than part-skim cheese and contains less moisture than fresh mozzarella, so it’s exceptionally creamy. It’s also formulated with an ideal pH for melting (around 5.3) that causes its protein structure to hang together relatively loosely and flow more easily when heated.
What might be surprising is that preshredded mozzarella melts better than a block you shred yourself. The powdery coating on the shreds (usually cellulose powder plus potato, tapioca, cornstarch, or a mix) that helps prevent them from clumping encourages smoother melting by inhibiting the milk proteins from bonding together too tightly. Not only that, but the added starch’s ability to keep the protein strands separate helped the corn cheese we made with commercial shredded mozzarella stay gooier and stretchier longer than a batch made with freshly shredded cheese.
Despite its superior meltability, preshredded whole-milk mozzarella can be trickier to find than part-skim; if it’s unavailable, we suggest tossing 6 ounces of freshly shredded block whole-milk mozzarella with ¼ teaspoon of cornstarch.
The block kind (as opposed to fresh mozzarella) was a given: It’s a rock star melter, and since its mainstream presence has grown in Korea over the past few decades, it has become a component that ratchets up many of the cuisine’s most iconic dishes—buldak (fire chicken), kimchi bokkeumbap (kimchi fried rice), tteokbokki (sweet-spicy glutinous rice cakes)—to next-level craveability.
But during testing I learned to be mindful of which particular product I used.
Whole-milk mozzarella tasted richer than the part-skim stuff; that was no surprise. What did catch me off guard was the batch of corn cheese I made with preshredded mozzarella. I was merely testing the viability of the convenience product, which turned out to be noticeably smoother and creamier—and stayed that way longer—than the batch made with whole-milk mozzarella that I’d shredded myself.
The key, I discovered, was the starch that keeps the shreds from clumping, which also encourages gooier, longer-lasting meltability. (Freshly grated mozzarella mixed with a little cornstarch works equally well.)
The Over-Under
As for incorporating the cheese: A lot of recipes call for simply blanketing the sautéed, mayo-bound corn with mozzarella. But in my tests, placing all that cheese at the surface allowed it to cool and congeal quickly after cooking, resulting in a tough, nearly impenetrable layer atop a pile of loose corn.
So I flipped the equation, stirring two-thirds of the mozzarella into the corn with the mayonnaise and sprinkling the remaining portion over the top before broiling. Not only did the cheese below the surface bind up the corn and make a more evenly gooey dish, but it stayed warmer and stretchier for longer because it was insulated by the hot corn and closer to the heat‑retaining cast iron.
Not that corn cheese ever sticks around for long. Set out the dish with a big serving spoon or a bag of corn chips and watch the bubbly, gooey, sweet‑savory stuff get scooped up.
