Stanley Tucci’s Corn Buttering Method Is Actually Genius

Stanley Tucci’s background as a star in two iconic food films (“Big Night,” for which he was also a producer, and “Julie & Julia,” in which he played Julia’s husband Paul Child) set him up to be a food celebrity. But his memoir, Taste: My Life Through Food, cemented his street cred in the food space and his rise in recent years as a TikTok food celeb.

Taste is an easy reading venture through Tucci’s life, from his childhood in Katonah, New York to recent years as an American expat in London. Along the way, he manages to eat his way through epic Italian holiday dinners, seaside lobster boils, and a particularly barn-yardy feast with Meryl Streep. He does this all while sharing plenty of strong opinions.

And, as I learned while reading his memoir, even the corn in his life gets a surprising treatment. In Tucci’s family, corn buttering is not done with a butter knife.

Putting The Tucci Buttering Method to the Test

I absolutely had to give this a try. Now, part of the magic of this combination is almost certainly the homemade bread, but I am a realist and I am simply not getting homemade bread on the table tonight. In lieu of a fresh loaf, I tested Tucci’s method with the next best thing: take and bake.

A warm loaf of supermarket bakery bread isn’t going to win any awards, but it’s still warm bread with all the associated charms, and it will do quite nicely for our purposes. While my loaf was  warming in the oven, I cooked the corn and made sure I had a stick of softened butter and some salt waiting in the wings.

The key to this method is treating butter more like cream cheese. I slathered that butter onto the (still warm but not piping hot) bread with reckless abandon. A modest, sensible layer isn’t going to cut it. If this makes you uncomfortable, you should stop reading. Now. 

Holding the generously buttered bread in my non-dominant hand, I used my dominant hand to rotate the ear of corn over the bread, moving it back and forth as needed to coat every centimeter. As the hot corn hit the softened butter, the butter melted immediately, enrobing each kernel in a warm, buttery hug.

According to Tucci, salt goes on the ear of corn first, but my own tests revealed that it’s much easier to salt buttered corn, so do what you will with that information. Just make sure salt is involved at some stage of the process. I sprinkled on flaky salt for texture, but use what you have.

My findings: this is indeed an effective way to butter corn. But, the true beauty in this method is, as Tucci says, that you also have a warm piece of bread drenched in melted butter, salt, and sweet corn juice. The corn is going to be great no matter what, but that slice of buttery bread? A masterpiece.