Dirty Ice Cream: Traditional Filipino Ice Cream or Sorbétes
The Filipino ice cream (Tagálog: sorbétes) is pejoratively called “dirty ice cream” and is traditionally made with coconut milk and/or carabao milk (which Kapampángans are particularly famous for and fond of).
Sorbétes is sold in colorfully painted wooden carts on the street by ice cream vendors known as sorbetéros.
They come in a wide variety of colorful flavors, with the most popular ones including ube (purple yam), cheese, chocolate, mango, coconut, rocky road, cookies and cream, and strawberry.
Ice cream is also one of the ingredients in the classic Filipino dessert halo-halo.
The first Filipino traditional ice cream (sorbetis, from Spanish sorbetes) was made during the late Spanish colonial period to early American colonial period using a traditional ice cream maker called a garapinyera (from Spanish garapiñera, an old style of ice cream freezer).
It consisted of a metal cylinder filled with the ice cream ingredients, enclosed by a wooden bucket filled with ice. It had a cranking mechanism that churned the contents of the cylinder until it acquired the texture and consistency of sorbets. This typically took hours, and salt was added to the ingredients to speed up the freezing.
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