Dessert Landscape

Dera – Pakistani Falooda Kulfi

Dera, located in Jackson Heights, and the tastiest Pakistani restaurant I’ve ever been to, serves a most wonderful dessert: falooda kulfi.  It comes, soup-style, in a large bowl and is best shared by two people who know each other quite well (as I believe two people sharing soup should).

Falooda is a liquidy dessert, often a sweet beverage, that comes from South Asia.  From what I can surmise, Dera’s has vermicelli noodles, milk, ice shards, tulsi (basil) seeds, rose syrup, green food coloring, and both frozen and room temp kulfi.  Kulfi is a traditional South Asian ice cream made from evaporated milk, sweetened condensed milk, and heavy cream that is thickened with cornstarch.  Observe:

This dessert is a real project to eat, and it’s got several different textures, so it’s interactive good times!  The frozen kulfi comes on a popsicle stick that you scrape away at with your spoon.  It’s so cold that it starts to freeze the nearby noodles as you eat,  turning them from squirmy wormies to stiff wormies.  The room temp kulfi is smooth, creamy, and sweet, while the basil seeds add a nice little crunch.  The ice shards do get a little annoying after awhile as some of them are too big to want to bite down on, so you end up trying to avoid them to slurp up the soup.  As all of the ingredients melt together, the rose syrup turns the soup a nice Pepto-Bismol shade of pink, which is dotted with the green food coloring and yellow kulfi.  It is a delicious, impressionist-style masterpiece!

Tags: falooda, ice cream, Pakistan, soup