An empty U-Haul truck rattled for hours down twisting backroads in southeast Missouri last week to an Old Order Mennonite community of 25 families outside Fredericktown.
At the wheel was a vegetable broker on a secretive culinary mission. St. Louis Public Radio has agreed not to use his name in this story because he's afraid of losing his day job.
His prize: a handful of gnarled, infected corn ears that some St. Louisans are paying top dollar for.
The Mennonite farmers typically sell picture-perfect produce alongside jams, furniture and baked goods at the Home Gardens Community Market in Farmington.
But sometimes, they'd find these ugly, blue-tinged growths on their corn.
"Growing up I didn't know it's something to eat," market manager Ephraim Brubaker said. "We kind of avoided it and thought it's a bad thing in the field. Now we're selling it for $10 dollars a pound."
Those growths are huitlacoche, also known as corn smut. They don't look particularly edible. The growth essentially is a cancerous tumor, brought on by a fungus that deforms the corn, turning golden grids of kernels into bulbous, gray globules.
For centuries, Aztecs and their descendants have eaten this seasonal delicacy. Now, it's increasingly showing up on menus and grocery store shelves in St. Louis. A growing Latino population, increasingly favorable weather conditions and adventurous diners are prompting chefs and purveyors to seek it out, and the broker is stepping in to help.
On this day, there wasn't any corn smut ready and waiting for the broker to take. Instead, the farmer's son rode up on his horse to lead the broker to their plot.
There, among a dense stand of corn, the knotted galls waited.
DMs full of smut
Local Harvest in Tower Grove South is known for stocking seasonal produce from local farms, including rarer, foraged items such as pawpaws or ramps.
When manager Becca Widzer posted a photo of huitlacoche on Instagram and asked the store's followers to guess what it was, she got a lot of messages.
"People were like flooding our inbox with the guesses and like all of the messages just said, 'Corn smut, corn smut, corn smut, corn smut,'" Widzer said, laughing. "I'm like, 'This is a really weird thing for people to be messaging me.'"
This is the first year Local Harvest stocked huitlacoche. Widzer said selling it hasn't been a problem, even at $18.49 a pound, a price tag that puts it among the store's most expensive produce.
"I did put a little note on our sign explaining what it was and how it can be used just for people who aren't familiar," Widzer said. "But it does seem like our customer base is, a lot of times, very into food and might be a little more aware of some of these niche products."
But where does the corn smut go on a grocery store shelf?
"I put it by the corn because I thought that made sense, but I could also see it going with the mushrooms," Widzer said.
Corn cancer and climate change
It turns out, the corn smut is a delicious mixture of a mushroom, a vegetable and plant cancer.
"It's basically uncontrolled growth of corn tissue," said Dilip Shah, a scientist at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center who studies fungal diseases in crops.
Shah likens corn smut to a tumor caused by the fungus. Spores get into the corn either through injury or through its silk and reprogram the vegetable's cells to divide uncontrollably.
To form, corn smut needs a period of extreme heat, followed by a period of heavy rain.
"Under hot and dry conditions, the plants are also under stress, so their immune system becomes weak," Shah said. "The fungus can exploit the weak immune system of the plant to cause a disease."
After the fungus finds its opening, humidity may help huitlacoche grow quicker.
Shah said there is still a lot to learn about how weather impacts corn smut's development, especially as the climate continues to warm.
The conditions Shah described are becoming increasingly common around St. Louis during corn season, said Trent Front, the Illinois state climatologist at the University of Illinois.
"The overall average temperature of our growing season has increased," Ford said. He added that humidity has increased and is expected to go up more.
Huitlacoche could be a way for farmers to make lemonade out of lemons brought on by climate change, he said.
"Over the next 20 or 30 years, we will likely have more years that are warmer, more humid, more conducive for fungal growth than years that aren't," Ford said.
Shah agrees but said more study is needed to understand the complicated system.
Farm to table
If there is more corn smut growing near St. Louis in the future, there are also an increasing number of places excited to offer it.
Adrian Maldonado likes to imagine the first Aztecs who pulled back an ear of corn thousands of years ago and realized the bulbs of fungus were edible. He's the executive chef of Malo, an upscale Mexican restaurant in the Grove, and grew up in a proud Chicano family in California.
He said after moving to the Midwest, the corn capital of the world, it felt natural to put huitlacoche on the first of his eight-course tasting menus at Malo.
"There is a huge belief that Mexican food should be cheaper, it should be more casual, approachable, just kind of throw stuff on a plate," Maldonado said. "We don't believe that whatsoever."
Maldonado said in the past 10 years, he's also seen the Latino community growing in St. Louis, and census data backs that up. That trend has had an impact on food in the area, he said.
"It's a beautiful thing," he said. "Especially when I first moved out here, the question always was, 'Where can I get Mexican food?'"
Maldonado buys his corn smut from the vegetable broker, whom he jokingly calls his "huitlacoche dealer."
"He approached me a couple of weeks ago and he had some really fresh, beautiful stuff and I couldn't pass it up," Maldonado said.
He cooks the knobby deformities in a pan of butter, waiting for the spores to turn the mixture a luxurious black before adding lime and a generous pinch of salt.
"You get that smokiness, that saltiness, and you whip it in the butter, and you really can't go wrong," he said.
The huitlacoche butter is part of the first course, served on top of a nixtamalized heirloom corn tortilla and meant to get diners ready for a hearty dinner.
The taste of the huitlacoche is hard to describe — like both corn and a mushroom, while staying somehow sweet and savory.
So far, Maldonado said about half of his diners are familiar with huitlacoche. For the rest, he looks forward to the opportunity to give a little history lesson and said this will be on his menu in some form every summer.
Lessons from kombucha
Large vats of mushrooms simmer in a vat and a room of glass kombucha jugs holds the living cultures that produce the fermented beverage behind the scenes at the Confluence Kombucha taproom on Jefferson Avenue.
Owner William Esslinger grabbed a paper bag of huitlacoche from his walk-in refrigerator and slices it into thin cross-sections at a sun-lit cutting board. The inside is layered, almost like an onion. He pushes the chunks into bottles, then fills them with chanterelle-based kombucha.
"Mushroom on mushroom, you know," he said as he twisted a spigot to fill the bottle.
These drinks wouldn't be ready for a few more days. But out front, there was already a different flavor of huitlacoche kombucha on tap — this one accented with shiso, a Korean herb. Esslinger poured it into three small glasses, passing one to St. Louis Public Radio Visuals Editor Brian Munoz, no stranger to huitlacoche but a kombucha newcomer.
Esslinger is used to helping people overcome their food fears to try something new. Although kombucha is now popular around the world, when he first started brewing the fermented tea in 2009 and selling tiny batches at St. Louis farmers markets, he had to do a lot of education and advocacy.
"People were interested in it. They were also like, disgusted by it," Esslinger said. "It was such a fun way to be a performer in the world. People were like: 'You do this? This stinks.'"
Over time, the feedback helped Esslinger develop his recipes. And he said the kombucha helped him, healing issues he was having with his stomach and inspiring him to stop drinking as he launched his business.
He said his approach to helping people try kombucha is similar to his approach to ingredients like huitlacoche. He meets people where they're at and leans into the weird.
"I think with anything that's new, like huitlacoche and stuff like that, bringing humor is always the best medicine," Esslinger said.
Munoz knocked the gray liquid back.
"I think I'm sold," he said.
Esslinger hangs bells on his door for first-time kombucha drinkers to ring. Munoz gave them a shake, filling the room with the tinkling celebratory song.
St. Louis' huitlacoche fans hope more people will also brave the unknown to try the fungal delicacy soon.
"People have been eating this stuff forever and ever and ever," Esslinger said. "It's a fun thing that just gets thrown away. For me as a food preservationist, I want to continue those stories so people aren't just throwing that stuff in the field."
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