We All Scream for Asian American Ice Cream
In 2014, Pooja Bavishi attended a Friendsgiving celebration in New York City. She brought two homemade desserts—an apple crostata and a sticky toffee pudding—along with two homemade ice creams to serve alongside them. Her friends had become accustomed to receiving all sorts of baked goods from Bavishi, who was in her last year of business school at NYU “studying things like gaps in markets,” she says, but ice cream was a new twist. The flavors themselves were even more novel: gingerroot and star anise.
“I flavored them pretty robustly, the way I would flavor an Indian dish,” Bavishi recalls of her homemade scoops. The spices were infused into the rich butterfat of the cream, creating a pronounced flavor, silky-smooth and icy-cool. They were a b...