What are the modern or recommended ways of cooking corn on the cob? Most recommendations for cooking corn on the cob suggest putting it in boiling water for 10 minutes. I find this very undesirable for a number of reasons:


it takes a long time to boil the required water
takes too much of the flavour out
the water is wasted
so much energy is wasted


So, I cut them in half, and place them upright in a tiny amount of water—about 1mm depth—in a covered saucepan for 10 mins, making sure the water at the bottom is gently simmering.
What is the result?


It takes little time to cook in total: 10 minutes for the corn, and 2 minutes for the water.
I can use the water to flavor.
I barely uses energy once the water is boiled and the saucepan is covered.
The corn is juicy and delicious retaining its maximum flavor.


Now, I seriously doubt I'm some sort of culinary genius that has invented a new way of cooking corn, but I've never come across this method, so maybe there are more modern methods.
Lately, I've been direct grilling them fully stripped of the husk, with a brush of olive oil first.  Its relatively quick, but requires a bit of attention as you'll need to turn the ears.  You don't want the heat too high and it can be difficult not to dry the corn out.

It produces a distinct favor but its absolutely wonderful, everybody raves.  The slight smokiness and carmelization of the sugar in the corn heightens its favor considerably.  It produces a much different result than grilled corn wrapped in foil (which is essentially steaming the corn) or boiled corn.  Grilling in the husk is another common way, but its a much different result and not too different from grilling it with foil.



It was brought up in the comments, but the most 'modern' correlation to boiling the corn like you said, would be to sous vide it.  It's definitely 'modern', but sous vide is not quick.  It does preserve and intensify flavour well though.