Both ice cream and kulfi are frozen dairy desserts but if you’ve tasted both, you’ll know that ice cream is creamy and soft while kulfi is always hard.
To make kulfi, milk is first sweetened, then thickened and reduced by boiling and poured into small clay pots or kulfi moulds. It is then frozen by burying the pots underground with ice or by putting them in the refrigerator. Kulfis have a distinctive taste because of the caramelisation of milk and sugar that happens during the lengthy cooking process.
Traditional ice cream recipes involve the use of eggs which kulfis don’t have. Ice cream is made by preparing a custard from milk, eggs and sugar. This custard is then frozen. But unlike the kulfi, ice cream is made by continuously churning the custard during the freezing process. How good an ice cream is,
depends not only on the taste but also the texture. The churning process adds air to the ice cream mixture, making its texture smooth.
The origins of the two desserts also differ. While kulfi was invented by Arabs, ice cream originated in Europe.