He also had a pile of watermelons, jugs of mango and pineapple juice, and two SnoWizards, stainless-steel contraptions that produce the silky, fluffy ice shavings required for a true Louisiana “snoball.”
A snoball is to a snow cone as Warren Beatty is to Shirley MacLaine: closely related, but prettier, smoother and infinitely cooler. “In New Orleans, you can get killed if you call it a snow cone,” Mr. Williams said.
And no wonder — a snow cone is usually a mound of crunchy hailstones sitting in a pool of synthetic sugar syrup. The ice is crushed into pellets that send shivers up into the brain, and the flavoring has no chance of being absorbed into the ice.
But there is another way. A way of scraping ice so that it falls softly into cups like a January snowfall, and soaks up flavor the way dry ground soaks up rain in July. This is shaved ice, and it is a game-changer.
American food lovers, who seem to be re-examining every humble snack — beef jerky, pretzels, soft-serve — for artisanal potential, are now turning their attention to shaved ice. They are abandoning the Day-Glo aesthetic and fake flavors that they grew up with in favor of the true colors of summer fruit.
The new snow moguls draw inspiration from a whirling blizzard of these treats around the world: Hawaiian shave ice, Mexican raspados, Korean bingsu, Baltimore sky-blue “snowballs” topped with marshmallow, and Taiwanese bao bing flavored with palm sugar syrup. Indian golas and chuskis, sold by street vendors or gola wallahs, are flavored with rose, cardamom, orange and saffron. (A popular source is Saffron Spot, an Indian ice cream parlor in Artesia, Calif., south of Los Angeles.)
Most of them hail from places where summers are hot, and fruit plentiful: Latin America is packed with shaved ice treats, like Nicaraguan piraguas — named for their pyramid shape — Cuban granizados, and frío-frío (cold-cold) from the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico.
“I’ve seen them in Cuba, I’ve seen them in Uzbekistan, I’ve seen them in Korea,” said Nathalie Jordi, an owner of People’s Pops in New York City, who makes shaved ice topped with organic and local fruit syrups. “It’s the simplest possible summer dessert.”
Fresher than Fresh is a snow cone start-up in Kansas City, Mo., owned by Lindsay Laricks, a graphic designer who grows many of the herbs for her blackberry-lavender and watermelon-basil syrups. Ms. Laricks sells her snow cones out of a 1957 Shasta trailer at local markets and art openings. “The trailer looks like a canned ham, but the snow cones are all natural,” she said. “I hope to completely reinvent the snow cone.”
At Pulino’s, an ambitious new pizza restaurant on the Lower East Side of New York, the pastry chef Jane Tseng freezes a purée of almonds, sugar and water, then sends it through the fine grating blade of her Robot Coupe R2N so that a light almond-flavored snow gathers in heaps. It tastes like essence of tortoni, sweetly fleeting.
Instead of having the creamy texture of a sherbet (which is churned like ice cream), or the crunch of crushed ice, or the large ice crystals of a granita, properly shaved ice is soft and snowy on the tongue, and disappears instantly when pressed against the palate. The technology for shaving ice runs from Ms. Jordi’s simple approach (a large block of ice and a shaver) to the complex (the Japanese-made Hatsuyuki HF500, priced about $1,500).
Shaved ice is a wonderful carrier for fruit flavor, skimming lightly across the taste buds, beautifully demonstrated by Ms. Jordi’s lemon-plum combination, or the dry apple-grape concocted by the chef Daniel Holzman of the Meatball Shop on the Lower East Side
Mr. Holzman is the proud owner of a Hatsuyuki, which devotees say earns its price by making perfect shaved ice from regular ice cubes. Most machines require specially shaped blocks that can take days to freeze. (A comparison of home ice shavers is below.)
The notion of “perfect” shaved ice — dry, light, with the slightest possible crunch — becomes clear from one’s first mouthful (“bite” would be too strong a word) of the bingsu at Koryodang, a Korean cafe in the trend-loving heart of Koreatown in Midtown Manhattan. The ice here is powder-soft; the house-made green tea “sauce” that’s poured over it is milky and lush, but with no heaviness.
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via nytimes.com