Sweet Science - Sweet Corn Blueberry

Sweet Corn Blueberry - Sweet Corn Ice Cream with Blueberry Sauce

Today we review the second pint that I picked up at last weeks ice cream tasting for the Saint Paul-based Sweet Science brand.  The flavor is Sweet Corn Blueberry.   Sweet corn in ice cream?  I guess trying new and eclectic flavors is one of the inspirations for these reviews.  I am not really a corn-loving person, but I am quite curious as to how this will turn out.  Will it be like a blueberry corn muffin?  Or will it taste like a plate of corn.  We shall see.

It is called sweet corn because it is a natural variety of corn which has a higher sugar content.  This is the corn that we eat on the cob and as a vegetable (although technically corn is a grain).  Other varieties include flour corn, dent corn, flint corn (a subset of which is pop corn), pod corn, waxy corn, striped maize and amylomaize.  Those varieties are generally used for processed corn products (flakes, syrup, meal) and for feeding livestock.  Sweet corn is juicier and when not eaten fresh, it is canned or frozen right away to keep it from getting dried out and tough.

On to the ice cream!  Removing the lid shows the sweet corn base is a bright yellow as one might expect.  There is a splotch of blueberry sauce on the very top as well.  Digging in, the base ice cream really does taste like corn!  Fresh corn, too, not corn meal or corn flour.  There's no corn pieces in the mix, but somehow they've managed to extract that juicy sweet corn flavor and put it into an ice cream.  You get the full creaminess of the milk and cream as you are eating it but then once you've swallowed you're left with a similar taste in your mouth as if you've eaten a spoonful of corn.  Amazing.  The blueberry sauce is quite good.  There is enough of it so that you get a full survey of the blueberry flavoring, but not so much that you don't taste the corn as well.  A good balance of flavors.  I checked to see if this flavor combination had been done before and I found recipes for salad, salsa and crisp that all called for fresh sweet corn.  So, I guess this is a known flavor combination.

For me, this was fun experiment of a flavor that I did not know could exist in an ice cream.  That part was fun.  But I don't really like fresh corn as a vegetable, so I don't know if I would ever crave this.  I was able to eat the whole pint, so it wasn't gross or anything, but corn is not really my thing.  That said, I do know quite a few people who totally love corn and put it on practically everything.  I've even seen pizzas covered in sweet corn.  If you are one of those people, then you should try this because the flavor replication is quite well done.