Frozen dessert manufacturer maintains authenticity through in-house processing

Nestled among various companies in an industrial park off the Lyndon B. Johnson Freeway, about 15 miles east of Dallas Fort Worth International Airport in Farmers Branch, Texas, lies a sweet taste of India.

The facility is so unassuming that I drive past it a few times. Neither the GPS on my phone nor in my rental car help me, as they keep losing signal. I finally find it amidst the sea of ​​beige bricks, glass entrances and rolling doors, driving slowly through the long, narrow parking lot and looking at the scattered small trees along the edge. I park the rental car and go inside.

As I enter the nondescript lobby, I’m greeted by four people: office manager Tracy Huddleston, production manager Patrick Davis, CEO Aman Singh, and president Hari Singh. Aside from a few other people I’ll meet later, the facility is empty. It’s Friday and there’s no production, so the tour and production demonstration I’m about to see is all to myself. While such an honor would be great any time, this time it’s especially important because I have a lot of questions. The most important one is: What is Kulfi?

Aman Singh shrugs and gives me a tolerant, rehearsed answer that he has been asked many times over the years: “Indian ice cream.” But I’ve learned that it’s so much more than that.

I won’t go into the history of it all, that’s what the internet is for. But kulfi is essentially a traditional frozen Indian dessert that, yes, is essentially ice cream. It’s often made in home kitchens and sold on the streets of India, a country of around 1.4 billion people, so it’s interesting that it’s not more well-known. I realized this a week later when I was visiting friends whose parents were there from Toronto but who are originally from India. I told them about my trip and got an incredulous “You’ve never had kulfi?” response. It might just be my own ignorance, because Kaurina’s kulfi was available at Costco for a while before a change in the retailer’s business practices made it prohibitively expensive for the small Texas company to sell it there.

I mention all this because I’m pretty blown away when I first taste it. It’s incredibly dense. So dense that it takes a full 15 minutes after I take a 1.6 oz Pistachio Almond mini pack out of its packaging for a small drop to finally make its way down the side and onto my hand. I don’t usually have the self-control to wait that long before tasting a dessert that’s put in front of me, but Aman Singh insisted that I wait, not just to demonstrate the density, but also to enhance the flavor.

“The other ingredients you put in ice cream, like gums and stabilizers, actually reduce the flavor,” says Singh. “The film they form almost creates a barrier between the product contents and the stabilizer itself because it traps the water.”

“They capture the water to reduce the size of the ice crystals, which results in a creamy consistency because they (other ice cream makers) want you to have that creamy consistency from the start. That’s great, there’s nothing wrong with that,” he adds. “But since kulfi is meant to stay true to its shape and stay true to tradition, we don’t want any of that. We want people to take a moment and enjoy it. So the idea is that you enjoy it slowly. You take your time, don’t bite into it right away. If you take your time and eat it for 10, 15, 20 minutes, then you really know what the pleasure of a rich and creamy dessert is.”

The ingredients of the pistachio almond pop I’m trying are half-milk, cane sugar, toasted almonds, pistachios, freshly ground cardamom, natural green color (from plant extracts), and tapioca starch. That’s all. The caramelization of the half-milk, which is the closest thing to Indian buffalo milk in the US, is the key to the density of kulfi and its ability to create such rich flavors with so few ingredients.

Originally, this was made on a stove in the Singhs’ kitchen, where Jas Singh, the matriarch of the family, would stir the milk in a 2-gallon stockpot until it was just right – a process that took, and still takes, many hours. Flavors were then added before the mixture was poured into aluminum molds that looked like giant thimbles and then placed in the freezer. The family would then spend the next day or so bagging all of the frozen popsicles before taking them to sell at stands and local stores.

Amazingly, the process in this 30,000-square-foot facility today is almost the same as it was in the family kitchen. Perhaps the biggest difference, aside from the packaging machine at the end of the production line, is the 1,000-gallon container that has replaced the 2-gallon stockpot.

“It’s exactly the same, no shortcuts,” says Aman Singh. “We fill that with about 900 gallons of half-and-half, slow cook it and caramelize it for a whole day to get the right texture and consistency, which is only possible with slow cooking because the milk has to slowly evaporate to get to the right caramelization point.”

He says the company tried every possible way but never got it right. They might get the consistency right but not the taste, and vice versa. That’s also why production was done entirely in-house rather than working with a co-manufacturer. Singh says the family looked into it, but the need to boil the milk properly was always a deal breaker because that first step required the co-manufacturer to make an investment. Doing the first step themselves and then reporting the results to the co-manufacturer also proved too costly and logistically challenging. The Singhs rejected suggestions to use other ingredients to speed up the process, saying it would compromise quality.

“So we realized we had to do it ourselves,” Singh says. “We thought, ‘Okay, let’s build an ice cream factory.’ And here we are.”

The facility I was shown was not the one the company moved into straight from the family kitchen. In between and the current facility was a 5,000 square foot space that was used for nearly 10 years until 2019. From this small facility, the company was able to supply five regions for Costco.

“We were just bursting at the seams,” says Singh. “We were able to save enough money, take out a small loan and open this facility in 2020.”

Showcased here are some of Kaurina’s Kulfi flavours, as well as the company’s ever-evolving packaging style. Images courtesy of Kaurina’s Kulfi

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The facility currently houses one 1,000-gallon tank, but there’s room for two. As mentioned, about 900 gallons of half-and-half milk is poured into the tank and slow-cooked for about a day to achieve the right appearance and consistency—a process that relies far more on human judgment than precise measurements.

“It’s a craft process. It’s not just about temperature and time. It’s also about the visual,” says Singh. “So you need a trained eye that has done it many, many times to know when it’s right. You can’t just take a measurement or some other measurement to know if it’s right.”

Once the milk is properly boiled, it is piped to a second room where the flavors are added. Natural ingredients form the flavor base, which is mixed with the milk in one of three tanks. Flavors that contain bits of ingredients, such as almonds in the Pistachio Almond, are added in the next step. This ensures that these bits remain suspended in the solution and do not collect at the bottom. Workers then scoop the selected flavor from a bucket after it has been piped through the line and add it to the mold. Currently, the company has five to six flavors in circulation.

Once the aluminum molds are filled (18 pops per mold), they pass through a trough filled with brine chilled to -24°C for seven minutes to freeze the kulfi. At the end of the trough, the molds are removed and placed in a rack to drain off the excess brine. They are then dipped briefly in hot water to remove the pops for wrapping and packaging. Almost the entire process is done manually, with some automation only in the packaging steps.

Kaurina’s Kulfi sells kulfi not only in cases of soda, but also in quarts. While the news was making the rounds before this article was published, the company is trying something new with its packaging. (I was sworn to secrecy until the news was announced, and I even turned off my recorder – so I don’t have any quotes.) Kaurina’s Kulfi literally turns the traditional quart on its head by using the smaller end as the top and the larger end with the lid as the bottom.

The aim is to capitalize on the idea that eating kulfi is an experience. By opening the lid, consumers can pour the entire contents of the liter onto a plate, into a bowl, or onto whatever else they want to use for serving. The unique composition of the kulfi allows everything to come out as a single, shaped piece. Consumers can then slice it and serve it like a cake.

The idea wouldn’t work if the company took shortcuts in making its kulfi, Singh says. And that commitment to making kulfi according to the family recipe — and not changing it to speed up production and make a profit — is why consumers who know kulfi are fans.

“What has motivated us is the support of the community, the support of our family and friends to keep going,” Singh says. “It’s about sharing our culture, our heritage with the larger American community that we have embraced and that has become our home.”

“But the beauty of kulfi is that there are still a lot of people who haven’t tried it,” he adds, saying that trying new foods is rare today due to the availability of foods from different, diverse cultures. “So it’s a great joy to see someone try a flavor or texture for the first time and see the reaction, because that kind of thing doesn’t happen that often.”