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This recipe is an adaptation from the infamous Mexican food heavyweight Enrique Olvera. He’ll be gracing our shores for the Melbourne Food & Wine Festival in March next year and to celebrate his impending masterclass debut he kindly shared a corn recipe. A dish that he has become rather famous for.

Said recipe calls for chicanta – that’s ground ants for you and I. While I definitely consider myself an adventurous eater I’ve had many a brief and torrid encounters with ants in my lemonade/ribbon sandwich/culinary picnic item of choice in the great outdoors over the years and ants are not for me. I’m being grossly presumptuous and assuming they are not for you either so I’ve swapped in chipotle into the mayonnaise instead.

For the authenticity slaves among us, the original recipe is up verbatim on the blog. With this version I’ve no doubt bastardized a Mexican street food favourite but with the addition of black beans, coriander and avocado, this salad tastes great and won’t see you running around headless at specialty food stores asking where they might stock the dried ants.

Mexican Corn & Black Bean Salad

Ingredients

425g corn, husks removed, quartered

250g baby corn

1 bunch coriander, washed, roughly chopped

1 avocado, deseeded, roughly chopped

1 450g tin black beans, drained

1 red onion, finely sliced

Mayonnaise

1 egg yolk

20g Dijon mustard

250 ml vegetable oil

20g finely ground coffee

5g chipotle powder (ground dried chipotle chillies)

1 tbspn lime juice, strained

1 tbspn salt

Method

Add the egg yolk and mustard to a bowl. Whisk until they emulsify. Drizzle in the oil while whisking continually until a mayonnaise texture is achieved. Add the coffee, chipotle and lime-juice. Season with salt to taste and refrigerate until serving.

Char grill the corn pieces until cooked to your liking, starting with the quartered corn as this will take longer to cook and adding the baby corn for the last few minutes of cooking. Smear the mayonnaise over the corn, basting and turning the corn pieces until coated, reserving some of the mayonnaise for serving.

Place the coriander, avocado, black beans and onion in a large salad bowl and toss gently to combine. Add the corn and serve warm with the extra mayonnaise.