I Love Corn and the $10 Tool That Makes Prepping It Easy

This summer, I visited my boyfriend and his parents at their home for the first time.

Knowing we would be doing lots of cooking, I offered to help stock the fridge, and I filled it with a late-summer bounty of hybridized stone fruits, sweet-as-candy Sungold tomatoes, and, my favorite, a few ears of corn.

The corn immediately landed a spot on the next day’s menu. When I volunteered for meal prep, my boyfriend’s mother, who just so happens to be an excellent cook, handed me the six ears.

Suddenly, the pressure was on: I knew I needed to make the best corn salad of my life.

Armed with a chef’s knife and a too-small cutting board, I got to work at the far corner of the kitchen island, a single bead of sweat rolling down my forehead as I worried that half the kernels would end up on the floor.

This is when I wished I had packed my OXO Good Grips Corn Prep Peeler in my carry-on.

I first stumbled across the OXO Good Grips Corn Prep Peeler on a lazy Sunday morning in August two years ago. Before hunkering down to prep copious amounts of in-season corn to stash in my freezer, I wandered into a few kitchen-supply stores and spotted the tool, which promised to remove multiple rows of kernels from a cob in a singular, straightforward, and finger-shielding motion. For $10, I figured I’d give it a try.

The OXO Corn Prep Peeler is small and intuitively designed. It resembles a vegetable peeler, and it works like one, too. Its rounded, stainless steel blade has small, sharp, tooth-like blades that, once nestled against the ear of corn, strip the kernels right where they meet the cob.

Although hooking the blade to the ear takes some practice, once you find your rhythm, stripping the kernels becomes effortless. Plus, it alleviates worries about slicing off a pinky or a thumb. My favorite way to use the tool is placing it directly over a large bowl, so the kernels can glide easily into whatever crisp summer mix is ready to welcome them below. (As someone obsessed with minimizing cleanup, I always use this direct-to-bowl approach.)

If you’re using unhusked corn, I recommend holding the cob from the longer, stalk end. This allows you to strip from bottom to top, without getting the blade of the peeler too close to your hand or having to go back and peel off an awkwardly unstripped end.

You can also place an ear on a flat surface, such as a cutting board or plate, and strip in a horizontal motion away from your hand, turning the cob so that the peeled side provides a stable surface as you work. The trick is to apply more pressure than you think you need, as that way you get right to the core of things. (This tactic works for interpersonal conflict, too.)

I’ve since come across other corn strippers, but I like the simplicity and flexibility of the OXO Corn Prep Peeler, which stores easily in a drawer and can work on corncobs of any size.

The Chef’n Corn Cob Stripper is limited to just-the-right-size cobs, and while the Microplane Jar Top Corn Stripper and Peeler is intriguing (and almost certainly sharp, going by the brand’s reputation), I wouldn’t want to search for a jar every time I use it or to empty the jar after every couple of ears. And the multipart RSVP International Yellow Deluxe Corn Stripper, which contains the stripped kernels in a cylinder, seems like a pain to store — not to mention, it costs nearly $30.

If you don’t plan on stripping large quantities of corn every summer, you might not need a tool dedicated to the task. Typically you’ll do just fine taking kernels off the cob with a regular chef’s knife or a serrated bread knife, which Wirecutter writer Lesley Stockton prefers. After all, my street-corn salad went over fine (we polished off the whole dish).

That said, if your knife skills aren’t exactly chef-level, or if you’re working with irregular cobs, it can be hard to get the kernels off completely intact, without losing half their juice in the process or sacrificing them to the floor.

When it comes to prepping as much corn as I do, I find cutting corners is a necessary concession (even though the vegetable technically has none). With my well-loved OXO Corn Prep Peeler, I’ve been able to preserve summer’s bounty well into winter, when corn is replaced with decidedly stodgier options such as kohlrabi and cabbage.

And now I know to throw it in my bag for summer trips to my boyfriend’s childhood home, or maybe a shared Thanksgiving, so I can win a few more brownie points.

This article was edited by Marilyn Ong and Megan Beauchamp.