A Journey Begins With a Single Scoop

The ice cream had been cut into a half-moon slab that was dense to the touch and so cold my fingers went numb. It required teeth. It tasted as if it had been made on a planet with stronger gravity, concentrated yet airy, and smoking cold all the way down.It's hard to be astonished by ice cream these days. We've grown inured to the exotic, with a new generation of indie Baskin-Robbinses flaunting flavors like banana curry, Sichuan peppercorn and lox.But there are other, older ice cream parlors, tucked away in ethnic enclaves in and around New York City, where the flavors may seem exotic but are familiar to and beloved by those who make them; where ingredients like seaweed and pine sap are not tokens of acquired worldliness but occasions for nostalgia; where even the standard ice cream textures (that is, creamy or icy) don't apply. Over the last several weeks, I've traveled from New Jersey to Westchester County, New York, to seek out some of the more intriguing and undercelebrated shops.The ice cream I ate with my teeth isn't ice cream as Americans know it. Called kulfi, it is an Indian dessert dating back to the Mughal Empire, made from milk simmered until thick as cream, caramelized and nutty. I had tried it many times, from freezer bins at grocers and at restaurants high and low, but never fully submitted to its charms.Then I arrived at Kwality Ice Cream, which has, among other locations, a tiny storefront in Jersey City on a strip of henna salons and Indian cash-and-carries, a few blocks from the PATH station at Journal Square. (Only three stops from lower Manhattan, folks.) It has three flavors of kulfi: malai (in which the rich milk reduction is steeped with cardamom pods), pista (pistachio, with a nubby rind of nuts) and kesar (saffron, the lushest).Kwality has traditional American-style ice creams as well, including some confusingly labeled kulfi. "They are kulfi-inspired," the salesclerk said. One named Mawa Kulfi approximates the flavor of kulfi's caramelly milk base, which is like vanilla ice cream minus the vanilla; faloodeh, a floatlike drink of kulfi and rice vermicelli, is reimagined as Faloodeh Kulfi, a self-sufficient ice cream permeated with rosewater and crunchy with basil seeds.Here, too, are thandai, a buttery compound of cashews, almonds and pistachios; chickoo, laced with a fruit that conjures malt and spun sugar; and pan masala, named after (and studded with) the sprinkle of seeds, nuts, lime, cloves and menthol that you might throw into your mouth at the end of an Indian meal. It half stings, like toothpaste.Try to scoop up the ice cream at Cedars Pastry, in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and it stretches upward, tugging at the spoon, resisting. The tackiness comes from a base of kashta, Lebanese clotted cream, skimmed off the top of boiled and slowly cooling milk and mixed with glassy teardrops of mastic resin. There are mainstream flavors like chocolate and strawberry, but pay them no mind. The stretchiest varietals are plain kashta, chewy yet icy at once, and the less sugary, better balanced kashta with pistachio.Dondurma, Turkish ice cream, is traditionally made with goat's milk, mastic and salep, which is derived from the bulbs of wild Anatolian orchids. These flowers are now endangered, so Lezzetli Ice Cream - which recently started selling its homage to dondurma at the Hester Street Fair on the Lower East Side - substitutes Japanese konjac powder. The ice cream is churned in a machine, frozen, then beaten with a long rod (as is traditional) until it clings to itself. Of the four flavors currently available, Chios vanilla, named after the Greek island where the mastic tree grows and thoroughly colonized by flecks of vanilla bean, is the doughiest; pull it and you can see strands part, as with string cheese.Paleteria El Sabor de Michoacan is an unassuming Mexican shop in New Rochelle, New York, about a half-mile from the Metro-North station. On my visit, none of the ice creams in the freezer case were labeled, but the salesclerk kindly recited them all. Best were tequila, a shade of blue somewhere between swimming pool and Tulum, tasting almost like the real thing, albeit with the edges buffed; lime, fluorescent green and seethingly tangy; tres leches, loaded with chunks of milk-and-cream-soaked cake; and mamey, hibiscus pink and tasting of almonds, raspberries and sweet potato pie.Sweet Dynasty, next to a gas station on a noisy avenue in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, favors the standard voluptuous American style of ice cream, in flavors like purple taro (almost a deeper, rounder vanilla) and red bean (not too sweet, a rarity for this flavor). Also lurking is durian, the fruit so notoriously smelly that in some Southeast Asian nations it is illegal to eat on mass transit. Even in the freezer case it's clearly trouble, the only ice cream to have a lid tamped over it. Odd, because it had no scent at all, only the fruit's vaguely sweaty flavor, a swirl of custard, papaya, caramelized onions, butterscotch and cheese.Sundaes and Cones started out in Brooklyn, before moving to the East Village. Here green tea yields just enough bitterness to prove its origins; black sesame tastes more exactingly of its title ingredient than any I've had. But wasabi is strangely deracinated, all flavor and no heat. To the south, Chinatown Ice Cream Factory has the scenic advantage of a cinematically claustrophobic Chinatown block (plus Xi'an Famous Foods next door, for lamb face as a chaser). Scoops are wildly generous. Zen Butter captures the essence of cold sesame noodles. But other flavors, like a pleasant but umami-less soy sauce, occasionally go out of focus.Thai ice creams tend to be more crystalline and sweeter, at least the ones found at SkyIce in Park Slope, Brooklyn, which does well with evanescent flavors like cucumber lime and lychee rose; and at Tea Cup Cafe in Elmhurst, Queens, which serves, amid a clutter of Blythe dolls and Polaroids, ice creams suffused with green tea, military in color and tasting almost burned, and Thai tea, garish orange with a distant floral tinge.The Greek owners of Fresco Gelateria, in the East Village, honor their roots with a beautifully light goat cheese fig gelato, with the fluffiness of goat cheese and just enough honey and fig to approach rather than fully embrace sweetness. Across town, at Cones, in the West Village, corn ice cream comes with a toasty undertone and a dusting of cinnamon, a nod to the owners' South American heritage.One last stop: Johnny Air Mart, a Filipino market in the East Village, for a tub of Magnolia ice cream, produced by a California-based company run by a Filipino-American family. Cross your fingers that they have macapuno ube, coconut mixed with sweet purple yam, purple as hydrangea, creamy and expansive. This is the Filipino vanilla, the baseline, the comfort you return to after other flavors inevitably fall short. It tastes as if you've been eating it your whole life.© 2014 New York Times News Service