Sweet Corn Pastry Chef's New Best Friend

Though pastry chefs measure their day's work in sugar, life's not all sweet for them. As such, we're particularly excited about the latest muse of the dessert world: sweet corn. Pastry chefs around the country are pairing it with meal-ending stalwarts–with peerless results.

Uchiko, the recently opened sibling to Austin's famed Uchi restaurant, features a polenta custard with sweet-corn sorbet (pictured). Pastry chef Philip Speer tops it off with caramel salt, a blend of dehydrated caramel and popcorn.

One of pastry chef Karen DeMasco's signature dishes at New York's Locanda Verde is her sweet-corn budino (pudding) with berries; she achieves its rich flavor by steeping kernels and cobs in milk to form the base of her dessert.

The corn dessert offering at Stephanie Izard's new Girl & the Goat blurs the line between sweet and savory: Frozen corn nougat meets apricots and a tangy bacon gastrique.

And at Tony Maws's Boston fixture Craigie on Main, Anson Mills grits support a cardamom-infused strawberry compote and crème fraîche ice cream (click here to download the recipe).

Eat our vegetables? You don't have to tell us twice.