Parched corn (at least after it's ground) is called "pinole" here in the Southwest. It was an absolute staple of the native tribes.
I've always used corn from cobs I let fully mature and dry on the stalk. What we're used to buying in the supermarket is actually not quite ripe--it's an immature stage called "milk" corn (if you puncture a kernel with your thumbnail, a milky juice comes out). For parched corn, I always let it just fully mature and dry out, then just rub the seeds off the cobs. Now, some corn is better for this than others. The varieties you'll get in most garden stores will be the kind eaten in the sweet, immature stage, and might not do as well as the older "flour corn / flint corn" varieties for drying; they might mold on the cob, or something. For varieties that they really used to use for parched corn, check out
[url] www.nativeseeds.org[/url] --this is a nonprofit that seeks out people who are still growing non-hybrid varieties like they were hundreds (or thousands) of years ago, then collects and stores (and grows and sells) the various varieties, chiefly to keep the old varieties alive. (It's worthwhile browsing their seed list--you can get all sorts of authentic, old-style heirloom seed varieties there, for things from corn to tobacco to sunflower to squash to beans to peppers to cotton. And this is the real thing, not some modern, genetically- engineered, nobody-grew-them-before-modern-
farming hybrid plant. If you are attracted to shooting 200-year-old guns, you might really enjoy growing 500-year-old varieties of crops) I've grown a lot of their varieties myself, and they all parch nicely. I do it in a cast iron skillet, without any oil, and let the kernels swell and sometimes crack just a bit. They're then much easier to grind. A lot of the kernels end up kind of like the almost-but- not-quite-popped kernels in a bag of microwaved popcorn--they're fragile enough to grind or even (cautiously) chew (beware of breaking teeth if you haven't brittled the kernels enough! Self-reliant lifestyles are less fun with broken teeth!) I usually add just a touch of salt and sugar, which brings out the flavor. My kids love it this way. It's very flavorful, in a subtle way, and remarkably sustaining. My usual variety is blue corn--which is GREAT for parching; you can get it by the pound via various eBay sellers, or at some esoteric health-food or home-processed-food suppliers.
One of my fellow church elders is an old(er) Hopi Indian, who grew up in one of the villages on the reservation. He uses the pot-full-of-heated-sand method to parch corn. Me, I'm a little concerned that you'd get a bunch of sand grains in the kernels no matter how hard you tried to strain them out, and you'd end up wearing your teeth down--which was a common and big problem with Indian cultures that used lots of stone-ground corn.
