Now starring: panna cotta

For years, pastry chefs put tiramisu on their menus, whether or not the establishment was Italian, because the sweet concoction of cake and custard was a surefire sell. Then the fashion moved on to creme brulee, a thick, egg-rich custard with crackly caramel on top.

Now the scale has tilted once again, and the new darling is panna cotta. The turned-out cream, which is milky and barely set, is sometimes tinted golden or decorated with striking purees.

At Davio's in Park Square, pastry chef Tom Ponticelli makes a panna cotta intriguingly infused with saffron and garnished with roasted pineapple. Natalia Andalo gilds the top of Troquet's panna cotta with a layer of jelled maple. The Theater District pastry chef also adds a scoop of pear sorbet. UpStairs at the Square's Dina Sorenshein includes a vanilla bean version. Carmen Quagliata at the Vault pairs the creamy dessert with fruit purees. And at Le Soir in Newton Highlands, pastry chef David James features a panna cotta Napoleon that he recently took to the James Beard House in New York. A staple of Northern Italy, where rich farmland means an abundance of dairy, panna cotta

should be silky and light, says Michelle Topor, who leads food tours of Boston's North End and Italy, "with that nice dairy flavor." Despite the apparent simplicity of a dessert made with four ingredients, the gelatin is tricky, says Topor. Too little and the dessert, which doesn't have the thickening agent of egg yolk, is runny; too much, the usual problem, and what should be light as air turns rubbery. Le Soir's James says that he always stayed away from panna cotta because he wasn't "big on gelatin." But several years ago, he ate at a little hole in the wall in Siena, Italy, and decided to order the panna cotta, a speciality of the region. "I loved it," he says.

His panna cotta is more complicated than the classic version. Made with creamy mascarpone and layered between caramelized puff pastry, the dessert is garnished with maple roasted pears and dried cherries. Some customers come in specially for the dessert, says the pastry chef; he changes flavors by the seasons.

After making panna cotta for six years, Troquet's Andalo says, it seems simple. Her version isn't unmolded -- she serves it in glass so you can see the layers -- so she can use as little gelatin as possible. "You can play with a lot of flavors," she says. Those include chocolate and coffee. Usually she keeps the panna cotta classic and varies the flavor by adding the jelled layer. In the summer, it was a passion fruit layer over vanilla panna cotta with raspberry sorbet; last spring, a verjuice layer with apple sorbet.

Ponticelli of Davio's pours caramel into the bottom of the molds so when he unmolds them there's a golden glaze on top. He wants his panna cotta to be as light as possible -- it's already a little lower in calories than creme brulee because there are no egg yolks.

Pastry chefs may tout the simplicity of panna cotta, but this dessert is rarely seen in books for people cooking at home. "Home cooks are not used to working with gelatin," says Ponticelli -- unless it's adding boiling water to a packet of Jell-O. He thinks that "gelatin became bad" to ambitious home bakers because of the outrageous gelatin molds of the 1950s. Properly melting and dissolving gelatin into liquid became intimidating.

In Italy, that's certainly not the case. "It's more of a European thing," says Ponticelli.

Chefs, though, are thrilled to have an alternative to creme brulee in this silky dessert. "If I hear one more person ask for creme brulee," says James of Le Soir, "I think I'll scream."