We’re in a New Age of Innovative—And Nondairy!—Ice Cream
ANA UHIBB, ANTA TUHIBB, nahnu jami’aan nuhibb al-booza!
Isn’t that what the kids say these days? It should be. (The phrase is Arabic for I scream, you scream, we all scream for booza!) Booza is a Middle Eastern ice cream made with ground orchid root and tree resin, and before I go on about it—which I could for a while—I’d like to point out that booza is just one of a breathtaking variety of iced desserts on offer this summer. Whatever nadirs of democracy we’ve reached, we have ascended a pinnacle of frozen treats. Ours is a sweetened and chilled golden age! It is an ice-cream belle epoque.
Here is kakigori, a featherlight pile of Japanese shaved ice doused in emerald-green matcha syrup. There are Mexican paletas—ice pops—in tantalizing flavors like cinnamon with goat-milk caramel, or mango and chile. And pints of creamy green Cado, an Iowa-made avocado-based concoction, in seven different flavors. Why not sample whipped acai from California? A spoonful of Italian gelato swirled with tangy cheese? Or something delicious and vegan—with a coconut base or almond or cashew—delicately flavored with black sesame?
For far too long we have limited ourselves—out of some perverse culinary myopia—to churned dairy products made of at least 10 percent milk fat, less than 1.4 percent egg yolk, and weighing at least 4.5 pounds per gallon. (That is an abbreviation of the FDA definition of ice cream, which is 2,408 words long and makes the tax code read like Pat the Bunny.) How naive we were! For the record, what we think of as “American ice cream” actually originated in Italy in the seventeenth century and was typically eggless. (Maybe this is why gelato has been embraced here since the 1980s.)
Our horizons are finally expanding. A worldliness has taken hold—the same one that landed ramen and poke in the mainstream—along with a coinciding openness to plant milks and plant-based foods in general. What sentient oat milk–loving cosmopolitan wouldn’t have her interest piqued by a scoop of tahini-flavored Indian kulfi? You’d have to be from the seventeenth century.
Are any of them any good? I’m glad you asked. In the interest of finding out, on the first warm day of spring, I drove to the nearest, largest Whole Foods and bought every nondairy ice cream I could find (there was an entire case devoted to the category) and logged on to the website Goldbelly, which ships specialty foods—to order vegan ice cream in Asian-inspired flavors from a New York–based company called Noona; four pints from New York’s Tipsy Scoop in fascinating flavors like Cake Batter Vodka Martini (I’ve never tasted a cake-batter vodka martini!) and a case of Indian-influenced ice cream called Malai (from Brooklyn) in cinnamon almond, masala chai, and sweet milk. Portland’s ice-cream emporium Salt & Straw has a whole nondairy line, which they shipped direct. As did the Oregon company SO Delicious, which makes cashew milk–, oat milk–, coconut milk–, almond milk–, and soy milk–based frozen desserts. A case of booza from Republic of Booza in Brooklyn, and some Coconut Bliss (flavor: Infinite Coconut), bought at my favorite local supermarket, rounded out my selection. The total pint count was something close to 50. (The counting was done by a seven-year-old. It is my opinion that she was distracted and may have double counted or made omissions.)
On a balmy Sunday evening, after a modest meal of eight pizzas, a small group, including the seven-year-old, her eleven-year-old brother, my son (two), and his cousin (three), plus two adult ice-cream aficionados born and raised in close range of the Ben & Jerry’s factory in Vermont, one writer who is a known contrarian, and sundry other grown-ups gathered in my kitchen. I’d designed my tasting with care and discretion. A pretty cream-colored flowerpot full of spoons was arranged at one end of a long wooden kitchen counter and a pad of paper for ratings and reactions at the other. It would be simple to collect responses and draw a matrix of qualities and preferences.
But faced with 50 pints of ice cream, human beings go crazy. There was a stampede. My son absconded with a pint of vegan pistachio from New York’s Van Leeuwen (which predicted this whole trend with its artisanal ice cream served out of a buttercup-yellow truck back in 2008). I lost my notebook—its pages, I believe, were used as napkins. Eventually an adult turned on the water tap and insisted that everyone eating directly from a pint rinse his or her spoon and then move on.
This order imposed, some opinions emerged, which I report from memory. Many of the plant-based ice creams were found too icy. This iciness, some complained, exaggerated flavor. The richest nondairy candidates were made with coconut milk. The issue with coconut ice cream, though, is that its flavor is so strong that all varieties taste like coconut hyphenates. The contrarian declared an adamant objection to the entire category of nondairy ice creams. “Just don’t call them ice cream!” he shouted, feeling, I think, as though language and tradition themselves were under attack.
Technically, he’s correct. According to the FDA, there should be no such thing as “nondairy ice cream.” Why the FDA won’t admit that the definition of ice cream expanded de facto in 2012, when a technique for blending frozen bananas into “ice cream” swept the internet, I don’t know. (I assume it’s the dairy lobby, which is still working on legislation to limit the definition of milk to the product of lactating ruminants.)
As someone with great emotional affection for lactose but no physical tolerance for it, I am blessed with the ability to taste through nostalgia and FDA parochialism. Cado mint-chocolate-chip is as creamy and minty as anything should be. I love Nada Moo’s coconut-based maple pecan—but then I adore coconut so entirely that my mouth starts watering when I’m around people tanning. All the Van Leeuwen vegan flavors, coconut hyphenates though they may be, were near perfect. Coconut Bliss is the most honest coconut ice cream on the market. Its ingredients are “organic coconut milk, organic agave syrup, organic coconut cream, organic dried coconut, organic coconut extract, organic vanilla extract.” It is coconut-flavored and coconut-textured, and its self-assurance is inspiring and delicious.
Are any of these healthier than FDA-sanctioned ice cream? Have you read the data behind the landmark nutrition investigation the China Study, and its subsequent repudiations and reinterpretations? Have you read the studies tying climate change to cattle (i.e., dairy) and the ones crediting managed animal husbandry and rotational grazing with improved soil quality? Do you know whether agave is as evil as sugar? The long-term effects of organic-soybean monoculturing on the ecosystem? No? Me neither. But I’ve read enough summaries to have concluded that it is unlikely that any version of ice cream should be eaten in large quantities, or that any version needs to be strictly avoided—unless you are also lactose intolerant or vegan or highly allergic.
After we had been tasting various frozen treats for fifteen minutes, it occurred to me that I should have called everything, including official ice cream, an “ice.” According to the authoritative pastry guide Frozen Desserts, that is the true umbrella category for all frozen sweets containing water and sugar. Frozen Desserts illustrates the larger ice-treat kingdom via an inverted triangle with cream, milk, and sugar syrup at the corners.
Just as I began searching for paper to draw a square, label it “ices,” and write those three in corners and “plant milk” in the fourth, a cry rose from the end of the counter. “This is great!” shouted a Vermonter to whom I am also married. “What is this?” he demanded. It was a pint of booza! I had been instructed by one of Republic of Booza’s founders to agitate each flavor before serving to achieve maximum chewiness. I’d forgotten, but when I tried to remove the pints of booza from circulation to paddle them in a Kitchen-Aid, all of the tasters formed a human blockade. I did my own sampling and found each already thick, slightly chewy and stretchy, and potently satisfying. I cast aside my attempt to reclassify ice cream and decided to focus instead on learning to demand a creamy, refreshing summer treat in Arabic. No matter what you call it, nothing beats booza.
Originally Appeared on Vogue
