Frozen Yogurt, Gelato, Kulfi and Softy: A Field Guide

The freezer aisle and the dessert counter both suffer from loose vocabulary. Here is a straightforward guide to four things that are genuinely different.

Frozen yogurt

Cultured milk base, fermented before it is sweetened and frozen. Tangy, comparatively low in fat, carrying live cultures, protein and calcium. Served soft at around minus four degrees.

Order it when you want something refreshing, you are pairing with fresh fruit, or you want a dessert you would be comfortable eating regularly.

Gelato

Italian ice cream, but with two structural differences: less air whipped in, and less fat than premium American-style ice cream. Because it is denser and served warmer, gelato tastes more intensely of whatever it is flavoured with.

Order it when you want maximum flavour concentration — a pistachio gelato is a genuinely different experience from pistachio ice cream.

Kulfi

Indian frozen dairy, and not ice cream in any technical sense. Milk is reduced by long slow simmering until it thickens and caramelises, then flavoured — cardamom, saffron, pistachio, mango — and frozen in moulds without churning.

Because no air is beaten in, kulfi is dense, and because the milk has been reduced, it carries a cooked, caramelised depth nothing else replicates. It also melts far more slowly, which is presumably how it survived Indian summers before refrigeration.

Order it when you want something rich, traditional and slow to eat.

Softy

The soft-serve of Indian roadside carts and mall kiosks. Usually a low-fat, high-overrun frozen dairy dessert dispensed from a machine. Light, sweet, and gone in ninety seconds.

Order it when you want something cold and cheerful and are not asking much of it.

The quick comparison

Where our own bias sits

Obviously we make frozen yogurt, so treat our enthusiasm accordingly. But we would happily argue that kulfi is the most underrated frozen dessert in the world, and that India has never given it the respect a Neapolitan gelateria gets.

Which is partly why our Pistachio Kulfi flavour exists — kulfi character, on a cultured base, considerably lighter.