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Head east! In the plethora of frozen offers, traditional recipes rooted in Greek and Levant cultures blow a real wind of escape when you need to bring the temperature down.
There’s hummus, there’s baba ganoush, but also falafel, and then there’s ice cream! Lebanon is far from content to satisfy us with its countless (and delicious) savory specialties. The cedar country has also largely integrated ice cream into its culinary culture. No wonder for a destination that lives accompanied by the sun 300 days a year. The recipe for Lebanese ice cream offers a completely different refreshing break from the taste experience known with Italian ice cream, sorbet or soft serve american. The reason is the lack of fresh cream. In Lebanon, we prepare the ice cream with milk, and above all we use mastic, a natural resin that we take from a tree that grows in the Levant region. We find this gum arabic in the most emblematic frozen recipe, the achta, based on milk, orange blossom and sprinkled with crushed pistachios.
NO to diets, YES to WW!
It all started with Bachir ice cream
Indispensable to tame the oppressive heat of an afternoon in Beirut, achta ice cream was popularized in France through the success of the Bachir house, a famous reference in the country of cedar with more than 80 shops. In Paris, the third generation of this family business established in the village of Bikfaya in 1936 has imported the generosity of Lebanese ice cream. Between the mountain of pistachio chips and homemade whipped cream, the address located in the heart of the capital has become a must-have since 2017. At the height of summer, the queue is often long, but the frustration of sweet tooths is less since Bachir opened a second address in the tourist district of Montmartre.
In the dynamic of the new tables that dust off the cuisine of the Lebanese mother, ice cream has become the other competitive culinary specialty. If the starred chef Alan Geaam serves it in his Qasti bistro, a new offer was also sculpted by the Bältis ice cream parlor in the Marais last year. A second address has just opened, in the Montorgueil sector, and still relies on the quality of the ingredients to appeal to sweet tooths, a limited dose of sugar as well as a collaboration with the Meilleur Ouvrier de France Jean-Thomas Schneider. If Bältis serves the unmistakable achta, it also offers a frosty journey with a flavor of thyme and olive oil, reminiscent of the typical breakfast based on labneh, the Lebanese cheese.
From Greece to Armenia
During these summer vacations, we won’t just be content to bring down the temperature by ogling the Lebanese horizons. The frosted trend actually engages the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, thus marrying the Greek countries. You can indeed use Greek yogurt to make ice cream. This is what Glazed, well known to Parisians for the quality of its frozen recipes, has undertaken. This summer, the brand that goes as close as possible to gourmets at the wheel of its food truck is adapting the spirit of soft serve – the American soft serve ice cream that we know above all in the form of a sundae, with Greek yogurt, combined with pieces of baklava with honey and nuts.
We can even push the frozen journey in the East to Armenia. Do you know spitak? It is a frosted cube of cream that is wrapped in paper and eaten in the capital Yerevan. At Mantchouk, in Paris, you can vary the pleasures by tasting this specialty prepared with pistachio, milk, rose, strawberry, chocolate or even orange blossom. Count 5 euros the spitak.