Ditalini, corn and a great deal of miso

A pasta salad you eat with a spoon, which is the highest form the genre takes. The original leans on mayonnaise. That stops here. Full-fat Greek yogurt goes in instead, and because yogurt is sour where mayonnaise is merely rich, the lemon comes down and a slug of olive oil goes in to put back the fat you just took out. Miso was always doing the heavy lifting anyway.

1. Sit a small bowl upside down inside a large one, stand a cob on the little bowl and shave the kernels off with a chef's knife. The kernels rain into the big bowl instead of across your kitchen. Do all four, keep the naked cobs, and hang on to the small bowl, you need it again shortly.
2. Bring a medium pot of well salted water to the boil and drop the bare cobs in. Simmer 10 minutes, then fish them out with tongs and bin them. You have just made corn stock, and it is reason enough never to bin a cob in August.
3. Cook the ditalini in that water to the time on the box. Before you drain, dip out a large mug of cooking water and set it aside to cool, then drain the pasta and rinse it under cold water until properly cool. Rinsing pasta is a crime in any hot dish and exactly right in a cold one, since it stops the cooking dead and takes off the surface starch that sets a cold bowl gluey in the fridge. The mug you saved keeps that starch where you want it.
4. Take half the kernels and put them in a dry skillet over high heat. Leave them alone 2 to 3 minutes until they take some black, shake once and give them another minute. Tip them onto a plate to cool. Half charred and half raw is the whole point: sweet pop against smoke, in the same spoonful.
5. Into the big bowl with the raw kernels go the cooled ditalini, the peeled celery and the scallion greens. Add the charred corn once it is no longer warm. Season with a big pinch of salt and a pinch of sugar, which sounds absurd and simply makes the corn taste more like itself. Toss.
6. In that small bowl, whisk the miso, lemon juice and Calabrian chili until smooth. Now whisk in the yogurt and the olive oil, then loosen it with a splash of the cooled corn water until it pours off the whisk in a ribbon.
7. Fold the dressing through the corn mixture. Taste, and be bolder than feels polite: more lemon, more chili, more salt. Cold food is dull food unless you over-season it while it is still at room temperature.

Chill at least 30 minutes before it goes to the table, and it keeps three days covered in the fridge. It tightens overnight, which is what the rest of that mug is for: a splash of corn water and a squeeze of lemon and it comes straight back.