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Booza

Middle Eastern frozen dairy dessert

Field	Value
name	Booza
image	Bakdash ice-cream shop in the old souk in Damascus.jpg
caption	Booza being sold in the landmark Bakdash ice cream shop in the Al-Hamidiyah Souq in the Old City of Damascus (2009)
type	Ice cream
served	Cold
main_ingredient	Sahlab, mastic
minor_ingredient	qishta

Note

the dessert

Booza () is a frozen dairy dessert. It is traditionally made through a process of pounding and stretching in a freezer drum, instead of the more usual churning method used in other ice creams, leading to a creamy yet dense texture. Orange flower water or rose water are sometimes added for flavoring. The firmness of booza allows it to be shaped into a roll, which is a popular traditional serving method.

History

Author dates booza back to the 15th century in the Levant region. It's thought to share an origin with the Turkish dondurma.

Geographic scope

Damascus

In Al-Hamidiyah Souq in the Old City of Damascus, there is an ice cream store named Bakdash that is known throughout the Arab world for its stretchy and chewy ice cream. It is a popular attraction for tourists as well.

International usage

A brother and sister team (Jilbert El-Zmetr and Tedy Altree-Williams) pioneered and created the first packaged version of booza in Australia in 2011. Using local ingredients together with sahlab and mastic (from the island of Chios, Greece), they recreated the traditional form of booza and packaged this in a take-home format available to consumers.

In 2018, a booza scoop-shop named Republic of Booza was opened in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, US, by Tamer Rabbani and Michael Sadler.

Booza vendors can be found outside the Levant region in areas like the Bay Area, US, and Sydney, Australia.

References

Fabricant, Florence. (2018-06-11). "Move Over Soft Serve, There's a New Ice Cream in Town". The New York Times.
(30 August 2018). "This ice cream stretches like gum - CNN Video".
"WHAT IS BOOZA?".
(27 June 2018). "Traditional Booza Ice Cream Debuts in Brooklyn". Michelin.
(19 August 2020). "Refugee shares a taste of homeland by creating business selling traditional Syrian ice cream 'bakdash'". CityNews Ottawa.
(12 Jul 2023). "Syrian booza in London: A Damascene ice cream made with soul". [[London Museum]].
(February 22, 2020). "Meet the Middle Eastern ice cream poised to swarm social media". Fortune.
Amos, Deborah. (2013-05-04). "As Syria Melts Down, Ice Cream Shop Sets Up In Jordan".
(5 February 2018). "The Syrian Baker Who’s Bringing the Middle East’s Most Famous Ice Cream to California". The New Yorker.
(24 October 2011). "Bring on the booza".
"Traditional Booza Ice Cream Debuts in Brooklyn".
(5 June 2025). "A stretchy, hard-to-find ice cream arrives in the Bay Area". San Francisco Chronicle.
(7 February 2025). "The stretchy ice-cream from Tripoli that Concord locals are queueing for". Good Food.

Info: Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

mastic-ice-creams levantine-cuisine

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