A stretchy, hard-to-find ice cream arrives in the Bay Area
Yet the region has long lacked booza, an Arab ice cream known for its distinctly stretchy texture. No longer: Roast & Toast, a new cafe in Berkeley, has become one of the rare local sources for the treat.
Roast & Toast opened at 1746 Shattuck Ave. in January, with emerald-green walls and Arabic music playing over the speakers, but only recently started selling fresh-made booza. Owner Fadi Alhour, a native of Palestine, noticed booza trending on TikTok in the Middle East, thanks in part to a viral song in which an employee from a Dubai booza shop rhythmically chants the treat's main ingredients while workers use giant mallets to pound the frozen treat into creamy, stretchy existence.
'It's trending,' he said. 'So many people are asking for it.'
Unless you're looking for it, you might miss the booza in Roast & Toast's glass scoop case, tucked among tubs of salted caramel and matcha gelato. It's dense and chewy — spoonfuls of booza stretch elastically like a seductive cheese pull. Roast & Toast tops it with chopped pistachio and kataifi, shreds of sweet phyllo dough.
Booza, sometimes referred to as the world's first ice cream, dates back to the 15th century. It was popularized by Bakdash, a famed shop in Syria that opened in 1885. Booza is typically made with milk, cream, sugar, salep (orchid root tubers) and mastic, a natural tree resin also used to make gum. While most ice cream is churned, booza is traditionally pounded by hand with a large pestle.
Alhour, though, believes the pounding is 'just for show' (and indeed, it's part of the social media attraction). He argues the mastic and salep are what sets booza's texture apart. He's been tinkering with the recipe for months, first on a home ice cream machine, and then a fancy gelato cart displayed prominently inside the cafe.
He grinds the mastic by hand in a mortar and pestle — he learned an electric grinder causes it to clump and stick together — and mixes it with pure, powdered salep sourced from Turkey. A little goes a long way: He mixes about a teaspoon of each with milk, cream, sugar and rose water for the base mixture. After 10 minutes in the gelato machine, the booza transforms from loose liquid to bulbous, marshmallow-like density. It is so thick that it's broken the machine multiple times.
Roast & Toast serves an original booza flavor and another with cardamom and rose water. Alhour writes down flavor ideas when they come to him; future experiments may include dark chocolate, matcha or brownies. He had never made ice cream before this, nor run a food business. He previously operated a mechanic shop and a shipping business, where he would often make espresso for friends. The coffee interest begat a cafe, then one that served sandwiches, then ice cream.
Before Roast & Toast, booza has been underrepresented but not totally absent in the Bay Area. Some Middle Eastern grocery stores in the region sell pints of booza from a Texas company. Similarly chewy Marash-style ice cream is on the menu at San Francisco Mediterranean restaurant Dalida; fresh booza can also be found at Levant Dessert, a Middle Eastern bakery in Menlo Park,
Levant owner Maya Fezzani, grew up in Lebanon and Syria and has memories of eating booza at Bakdash. She's been making it for several years in Menlo Park. Her shop doesn't have the capacity for hand-pounding, so here it's churned, flavored with orange blossom and rolled into a pistachio-covered log. Fezzani has mostly kept things classic flavor-wise, though she is working on an apricot version. She also seized on the viral Dubai chocolate trend to make a sundae layered with booza, chocolate, kataifi, pistachio and tahini.
Whether booza will catch on in the U.S. remains to be seen. 'It's up to the market,' Alhour said.
But, like in the Middle East, a video on Roast & Toast's Instagram has already been drawing in customers.
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