How To Use A Slice Of Bread As An Easy Tool To Butter An Ear Of Corn

Not since Goopy herself has an actor had as much luck pivoting to lifestyle celebrity status as Stanley Tucci. His expansion from cinema to food world success is a natural fit for the "Julie & Julia" actor, who played the taste-testing husband to Meryl Streep's spy-turned-chef, Julia Child in the 2009 film before publishing his first cookbook, "The Tucci Cookbook," in 2012. 

In Tucci's third book published in 2021, "Taste: My Life Through Food," the actor shares a corn-buttering method that now seems like it was destined for buzz, even off the printed page in his well-received "Taste." Rather than your standard knife application or good old whole stick twirl, this method uses a slice of bread as the vegetable-lubricating mechanism, flavoring both items more-or-less at once. The somewhat unexpected practice has since slinked onto the internet, with at least one TikToker claiming to have been "forever changed" by the relatively unique technique. Your appreciation may vary.

Although we prefer to store our butter right on the counter so it always stays a pliable room temperature, plenty of folks would rather chill it in the fridge. If you're a refrigerator-butter household, using a nice bit of hot, fresh bread to transfer the butter to the corn adds just a bit more heat that might help it melt rather than cool down the vegetable. The softer it is, the better the butter distributes, too. 

For the most zealously dedicated utensil-for-each-dish home cooks, buttering corn with bread also means fewer knives to wash. This might not move the dial for dining duos, but it does save a minute or two in the event of a peak-corn-season party. There's also always the small chance, real or imagined, that each item's flavors might mingle; it isn't totally out of the realm of possibility that some of the corn's sweetness would transfer to the bread. Likewise, salt already incorporated into your butter has a more pleasant texture on the corn than a few grainy shakes, or you could use compound butter for even more flavors. In all other circumstances, there's always the satisfaction of doing something just a little unorthodox and acting like you've been behaving that way forever, such as grilling bacon-wrapped corn on the cob.