The approach of summer means that fresh sweet corn is quickly coming into season, which means that corn soup should begin to appear on all sorts of menus. Last night, I enjoyed my first bowl of corn soup this season at Uva Trattoria in downtown Napa, and it was excellent. Actually, the more the think about it, the soup at Uva was one of the most satisfying things I’ve eaten in recent memory. But maybe that’s just because sweet corn soup has such a special place in my heart.

At one point in my life, when I was cooking at Auberge du Soleil, corn soup was my nemesis, and perhaps my biggest general concern (including anything outside of work). Rolling corn soup from scratch requires significant effort, probably more effort than most home cooks would even consider, even for a small batch of the stuff. First, there’s all the shucking. Then, there’s cleaning off the tassels with a towel, then cutting the kernels off the cob. At this point, although lots of work has been done, nothing has even been cooked yet.

In terms of bringing all of the ingredients together, the cooking part was easy enough, and the ingredients were simple: if memory serves, for a restaurant-sized recipe, it was something like 15 onions, one pound of butter, three slices of bacon, one bunch of sage, probably 80 ears’ worth of corn kernels, maybe one gallon of heavy cream, a few gallons of chicken stock, and a few gallons of corn stock (the latter, gleaned by simmering the left-over cobs in water for a couple hours). Once everything was assembled and cooked, the real work began.

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Summer is a busy time of year here in the Napa Valley, and corn soup would become incredibly popular, meaning that I would usually have to roll this 10-gallon recipe nearly every day. On better days, I had already shucked and cleaned the sweet corn the day before (and maybe even peeled and chopped the onions, as well). I learned to give myself this head start whenever I had the opportunity. However, I sometimes had to begin the entire process from square one, usually on a Saturday, after a busy Friday night (with Saturday night looking even busier).

For me, the most difficult part about making corn soup was the very last step: passing 10 gallons of hot soup through a chinois (all soups at Auberge received this final step of refinement). The corn itself was the issue. In contrast to something like butternut squash, which practically turns to puree during the roasting process, the corn kernels, with their fibrous outer pericarp, would resist the efforts of a commercial-grade blender. As a result, all of these left-over solids would quickly clog the chinois, which made corn soup extremely difficult to pass through fine mesh.

I should point out that the corn soup at Uva does not ever see a chonois, but to me, it really doesn’t matter (the soup is blended to a puree, but it reveals a courser texture than a “chinoised” soup). For me, the corn soup at Uva had fantastic flavor, and quite frankly, I have no issue with the rustic textural element of a soup that is simply pureed. Even without resorting to the chinois (the soup at Auberge was like velvet, just for the record), there is still plenty of labor that goes into an honest bowl of sweet corn soup.