#booza

Booza ( بوظة ) is a traditional treat from the Levant and is often regarded as one of the earliest forms of icecream ever created; having been invented roughly around the 1520s. Generally speaking, it takes on many potential ingredients and names around the Levant. However, the traditional components used in Syria tend to consist of milk, qashta(candied cream), sugar, sahlab(a root flour extracted from various orchids), and mastic(resin taken from the mastic tree). When finished, it is topped with fresh pistachios and flower petals.

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There's a lot of strength, refinement, and years of practice involved in making the perfect batch of booza. In order to produce large quantities of this food, a large pestle-like hammer is used to pound it in a freezer drum until it has an elastic quality, then stretched by hand and spoon. The hammers themselves are described to be roughly three feet tall, and look like this:

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One of the most well known producers of booza is Bakdash, a parlor located in the Al-Hamidiyah Souq, Damascus. Starting in 1885, it has since become the most popular parlor for booza in the world, a popular choice for tourists and locals alike.

Sources: x x x x x

The Wood Spirit Co. x North Vancouver.

Barrel-aged Nocino, Amaro Classico, Cascadian Gin, and barrel-aged Amaro.

Part 1 is here.

Things of note that didn’t make it into the previous posts:

1.) Total chilling-and-whisking time ended up being about three hours, but I think three and a half would have been ideal, had I not been very tired and ready to call it a night.

2.) I didn’t bother transferring the mix to a separate bowl for chilling because it cooled down so quickly in the saucepan that it just seemed like an unnecessary dish to wash. I just stuck the entire saucepan and whisk onto the ice rack in the freezer, didn’t bother with plastic wrap, and didn’t end up with a pudding-skin situation.

3.) I was whisking for about three minutes at a time at thirty-minute intervals at first, and thirty minutes was not enough to chill things down enough to make a difference before it warmed up during whisking. I didn’t start to notice a difference between whiskings until I upped the wait to forty to forty-five minutes.

4.) At least one recipe said that pulling the whisk eighteen to twenty-four inches up and letting things blorp back into the pot from height was integral to the process. I don’t know if it was necessary, but given the particular bouncy nature of the milk-slime, it was fun. It more or less turned into a giant stim toy for a while, there.

Anyway!

I did buy one piece of equipment. Just one. All of our Tupperware-adjacent containers are battered, stained, or an inconvenient shape for the freezer, and this long skinny double-walled thing is adorable, okay? Worst case scenario, I use it next time I make pear sorbet.

(It’s probably a good indicator that you’re old when you’re genuinely delighted by a well-made food storage container. But but but fits next to the ice cube trays!)

It froze, um. Bubbly.

Half the recipes say to scoop it as-is, at least one says to let this thaw for fifteen minutes, whisk it again, and then serve, and a couple of videos say it’s traditionally beaten with a booza mallet at this stage.

I, uh…I think I’m just going to scoop it this time around.

I have attained the ingredients.

I require no special equipment.