Zahle Tradition · Hand-Pounded Ice Cream
Booza
📷 Closely related photo — Photo: إيان (Ian) / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0
It's thickened with mastic tree resin and orchid-root powder instead of extra cream, and the old-school method still calls for pounding it by hand with a long wooden mallet until it turns stubbornly stretchy.
Milk, sugar, mastic, and sahlab (orchid-root powder) are churned and pounded into an elastic, chewy-textured ice cream, then rolled in crushed pistachios. Family-run parlors in Zahle, some running for generations, still make it by hand rather than machine.
Why it's made this way: Zahle's ice cream makers kept the old hand-pounded method alive across generations, giving the city's version a denser, stretchier texture than typical soft-serve.
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Part of World of Street Food — 3248 dishes from 118 countries.
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