Bur Dubai Persian Quarter · Saffron Ice Cream

Bastani Sonnati

Photo: Rye-96 / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0

Traditional bastani sonnati is folded with small chewy threads of frozen clotted cream rather than churned smooth like Western ice cream, giving it a stretchier, denser bite that Bur Dubai's old Iranian shops still make by hand.

Bastani sonnati is a dense Persian ice cream churned with egg yolk, saffron, rosewater, and crushed pistachio, sold from small Iranian shops around Bur Dubai's old Bastakiya quarter and Karama, either scooped into a bowl or sandwiched between wafers.

Why it's made this way: Generations of Iranian traders settled around Bur Dubai's historic dhow-trading waterfront, and their bakeries and ice cream shops kept recipes like bastani in daily rotation long after the neighborhood grew into a modern city around them.