Discussion Board

Jeff,

Since my CSA was lucky enough to have irrigation I am actually getting sweet corn! Going through the last box, it started me wondering how sweet corn gets sweeter when cooked. I guess I figured generally when you cook foods, you dehydrate them a bit and the sugars are more concentrated (more calories/sugar per volume). This makes sense for roasted tomatoes for example. But I am boiling my corn, so its not dehydration that makes the corn sweeter. So, my next guess is that some starch is converted to simple sugars or maybe there is some change in mix of the simple sugars due to cooking. But then I looked at boiled v raw corn comparison in nutritiondata.com and the simple sugars actually are LESS in the boiled version! This also seems to be the case with boiled carrots which are clearly sweeter than raw carrots. So now I am really curious why cooking these foods makes them taste sweeter?