Ice Cream

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Treat yourself to bastani — gorgeously perfumed Persian saffron-and-rosewater ice cream

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By Leslie Brenner

Last time I made bastani — the saffron and rosewater ice cream that’s one of Iran’s most famous and beloved desserts — my friend Greg closed his eyes, seeming to drift away to a faraway land, and said: “This may be the best ice cream I’ve ever had.”

After having tweaked my recipe a couple times, I knew I’d gotten it right.

There are several different ways to approach bastani. Traditionally, it includes salep (also transliterated as sahlab), a flour made from orchid tubers, which gives it a distinctive sticky-chewy texture. Sometimes bastani also includes nuggets of frozen clotted cream, or chopped pistachios folded in.

Egg yolks are another variable: Some versions use a lot of them, maybe six yolks for a quart of ice cream; others do without eggs entirely.

Whatever direction you take, chances are excellent that your bastani will be dreamy. How could it not? Rosewater and saffron are such an enchanting combination.

To make a custardy bastani, which is probably most common, combine and heat cream, milk, sugar and saffron, whisk the hot mixture into whisked egg yolks, slowly cook, stirring, until it coats a spoon, strain and stir in rosewater and vanilla. Chill it down and freeze in your ice cream maker.

I like bastani rich, but not heart-stoppingly so: Three yolks tastes just right.

And I keep it simpler — going for a smooth and velvety vibe; mine skips the salep and clotted cream. Chopped pistachios go on top as a final flourish, if I use them, along with dried rose petals. If you want to lean more into the pistachio vibe, go ahead and stir some in before you freeze it. Or skip the nuts, if you’re so inclined — it’s also delightful without them.

Want to try something really fun? Consider making the ice cream sandwiches known as bastani-e nooni or bastani-e nuni — a scoop of bastani between two round ice-cream wafers. Or you could plop a scoop into a waffle cone, for a pointy spin on that traditional treat.

If your goal, on the other hand, is to impress Greg, just serve a scoop or two in small dishes, and scatter those dried rose petals and crushed pistachios on top.

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For a luscious frozen treat this weekend, make Gianduja-Stracciatella (hazelnut-chocolate) Gelato

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Gianduja-Stracciatella (Hazelnut-Chocolate Chip) Gelato, adapted from a recipe in ‘The Perfect Scoop,’ by David Leibovitz

By Leslie Brenner

Given the unwanted Covid-19 pounds I’m still carrying around (dieting soon, promise!), I have no business making ice cream like it’s going out of style. But recently when I made a batch of fresh Bing Cherry Ice Cream and put it in my ice cream maker, the ancient yet trusty machine chose that moment to die.

I bought a new ice cream maker — a bigger, better version of my beloved Cuisinart machine that had been with me for something like 15 years. (I’ll write about that soon.)

The maker worked perfectly for the cherry ice cream, but then I suddenly had to know whether it also made perfect gelato, as it has a dedicated gelato setting. Although gelato is simply the Italian word for “ice cream,” as David Lebovitz points out in my favorite ice cream book, The Perfect Scoop, it is “usually less sweet than traditional ice cream, and it is very thick and somewhat sticky.” He goes on to explain that its “distinctively dense texture” is the result of very little air being whipped into it.

Lebovitz’s recipe for Gianduja Gelato jumped out at me, as I love classic gelato flavors, and you can’t get much more classic than giandiuja. Pronounced jahn-doo-yah, the Piedmontese hazelnut-chocolate confection (which is sometimes spelled gianduia) is the sweet that inspired Nutella — but it’s a hundred times better, with much purer flavors.

Although traditionally gianduja is made with dark chocolate (along with ground hazelnuts), Lebovitz’s recipe calls for milk chocolate. It sounded wonderful, but I wondered whether the four ounces of milk chocolate would make the gelato as chocolately I hoped it would be.

Gianduja-Straciatella (Hazelnut-Chocolate) Gelato in a waffle cone, set in a cup. The gelato was prepared from a recipe by David Lebovitz in ‘The Perfect Scoop.’

Then I noticed that the photo in the book showed Gianduja Gelato with an upgrade: stracciatella, or chocolate chips. Made by pouring melted dark chocolate into the gelato just as it’s finishing its churning routine, stracciatella may be one of the most important inventions every to come out of Italy — easily as significant as the radio, the Julian calendar, or confetti. “The flow of chocolate immediately hardens into streaks, which get shredded (stracciato) into ‘chips’ as the ice cream as stirred,” Lebovitz explains.

Yes! I had to have stracciatelli in my hazelnut gelato. And man, oh, man, is it awesome.

I’ve been parsimoniously rationing the gelato, allowing my husband Thierry as much as he’d like, but myself just very small scoop every couple of days. Not much help for my waistline, of course, but it is definitely making our heat wave here in Dallas a wee bit more delightful. In fact, it’s one of the best desserts to come out of my kitchen in a long while.