Golden Corn & Crispy Spam Pizza
Labor Day Weekend ideas
Dear Pizza Tourists,
At the end of summer, it’s such a treat to find corn at its sweetest — the kind you can eat raw, straight off the cob. I’ve been buying mine from my favorite stand at the market. The ears always look a little scraggly, but it’s organic, and the flavor is deeply satisfying.
Growing up, I never thought much of corn on the cob. I liked watching globs of butter melt down the sides, but beyond that, I didn’t quite understand the appeal. What I did love, though, were the “corn-flavored” snacks. The kind you’d find in Japanese convenient stores, artificial and addictive. But I digress…Twelve years ago in August, everything changed.
I was biking with a friend from San Francisco to Los Angeles along the Pacific Coast. We were sunburned, legs heavy from the climb, we coasted into a roadside farm stand that felt like a mirage. A young farmer greeted us and urged us to try the corn raw. Its natural sugar, he promised, was fuel enough for the miles ahead.
It was golden hour, the light spilling across the fields, and I remember biting into those crisp kernels — bursting with juice, sweet and grassy all at once. It tasted like pure summer.
For this week’s recipe, I was inspired by a mix of flavors that feel cheeky, nostalgic, and rooted in Los Angeles: the salty comfort of Spam, the gooey indulgence of Korean corn cheese, and the smoky punch of Mexican street corn. Could it be my own childhood snack? I’ll take you through the experiments from my test kitchen, share the final recipe, and end with a quick dispatch from a recent Pizza Tourist outing.
