Justin Fox Burks
Chef Andrew Adams captures the taste and color of summer with a bowl of sweet corn soup as stunning to look at as it is to eat. He starts with high-quality corn, cuts off the kernels, and uses the cobs to make vegetable stock. “The stock doesn’t look yellow, but it really pulls out the flavor of the corn,” he explains. Next, he sweats the kernels, adds them to the stock and purees the ingredients together. The corn becomes the thickener, so the finished soup needs very little cream. At pick up, Adams bedecks the soup with its crown jewels: tomatoes, green onions, cilantro microgreens, and Australian spanner crab (a newcomer to American menus) poached in sumac brown butter.
Contender: Blue Crab Cake with Spicy Ginger-Coconut Sauce
