We have 2 stores in the broader Houston area. These stores are open late and usually will have family tables to sit and enjoy ice cream together. It was traditional for people to go as a group late at night during summers and chat over ice creams .
You may visit them and try out the many different flavors of ice-cream, cassata (frozen cake ice creams), kulfi and falooda. Falooda is comparable (some folks may yell at me ) to ice cream floats and are flavored with rose water, … and have Angel hair noodles in them. Falooda is of Persian origin and just like Arabs have competitions around Hummus, Muslim communities in northern India compete on falooda too.
Some of the different Indian flavors of ice cream are :
Kesar Pista (saffron and pistachio)
Sitaphal (taste of Sugar Apple - comparable to South American Cherimoya or North American Pawpaw from the Anona family)
Chickoo (Sapodilla fruit - a smaller version of Sapote. If you ever had a Mamey milk shake , it is kinda like that)
Guava
Alphanso mango and Blue Mango (these mangoes cannot be imported. The only place I have had them fresh is Fairchild’s tropical garden in Miami. You can get different mango varieties shipped from Florida too)
Black Currant : this maybe a British import to India
British toffee : also an British import
Butter Scotch too
Sea salt Caramel
Lychee (a tropical fruit now available at many US cities)
I’m a traditionalist as far as ice cream is concerned. I like vanilla, chocolate and butter pecan. That’s pretty much it. Just the names alone of some of the flavors being sold are disgusting to me. “Cotton Candy”?! “Pink Bubblegum”?!
Some years ago I was having a live-group discussion on this very subject, although we were just discussing favorites, and when one person said, “Haagen Daaz Coffee,” at least two-thirds of the group closed their eyes in pleasure.
Thanks for the link to Kwality. I’d never heard of it before. There are 2 locations in New Jersey. I already messaged my gf that we should- nay! must go there.
In our two weeks in Italy, I never had a bad gelato. I used to really like Edy’s French Silk, but haven’t had it in a long time; don’t even know if they still make it. But the best ice cream I’ve had is here in MSP at a place called Sebastian Joe’s. They are local, with only two locations, one of which is two blocks away from us. It’s the most flavorful and rich ice cream (even the vanilla) I’ve had in my 75 years on the planet.
As for worst, it would have to be that crap they used to make called “ice milk”. Also, non-dairy ice creams like those made with coconut milk and the like are just uniformly meh. I tried a number of them, as dairy doesn’t agree with me, and decided I’d rather go without than try to delude myself that those products even approximate good ice cream.
There was a company that claimed they could custom create any ice cream flavor you could name. I want to say they ran a segment about them on CBS Sunday Morning a few years ago. But if you wanted sauerkraut ice cream and were willing to pay for it, they’d do an excellent job capturing the flavor.
broccoli ice cream
hot dog ice cream
barbecue ice cream
lima bean ice cream
aloo gobi ice cream
Yeah, I can’t imagine vegetarian ice cream. It’s a contradicition in terms. It’s something, but it’s not ice cream. All the fakey ice “creams” I’ve ever had were execrable. I’m not tempted to waste calories on any more.
On first blush, that sounds odd… but those are both seasonings commonly used in chai tea (yes, I know that “chai” is just an Indian word for “tea”), and I have no problem at all envisioning chai-flavored ice cream.
[quote=“Chronos, post:71, topic:977897”] chai” is just an Indian word for “tea
[/quote]
Nah. Chai comes from Cha, the Cantonese (China) word for tea. I think Cha means tea in Portuguese too.
One of the good things from Colonialism in India was the popularization of tea by them. Brits gave it away for free initially until everyone got hooked
“
Nearly all of the words for tea worldwide fall into three broad groups: te , cha and chai , present in English as tea , cha or char , and chai . The earliest of the three to enter English is cha , which came in the 1590s via the Portuguese, who traded in Macaoand picked up the Cantonese pronunciation of the word.[2][3] The more common tea form arrived in the 17th century via the Dutch, who acquired it either indirectly from the Malay teh , or directly from the tê pronunciation in Min Chinese.
Also in most Slavic languages as čaj or the Cyrillic equivalent. Oddly, not in Polish, where "tea* is herbata. However, “tea kettle” is czajnik so the čaj is preserved there. And it is pronounced pretty much like “chai” in English.
Apparently, in 1590s English, “tea” was “chaa.” I’m digressing here, so here’s a link to the etymology of “tea.”
Back to thread, someone mentioned H-D strawberry. We were talking over the holidays about ice cream flavors basically saying that strawberry was the worst ice cream, except for the H-D version.
If by “vegetarian” you mean “vegan”, I see your point. AFAICT, though, most items made with dairy products such as cream and milk are widely classified as “vegetarian”, as long as they don’t contain any animal products that required killing the animal to get them.
In fact, the Indian brand Kwality whose ad am77494 linked in post #61 describes all their ice creams as “100% vegetarian”.
I agree that if you want a good frozen dessert that doesn’t have dairy in it, go for sorbet or something else originally designed to be dairy-free, rather than fake ice cream trying to simulate dairy products.
