Green chilli, fried and crumb-coated ice creams sting the tastebuds and emerge winners.
What happens when two youngsters, one of them armed with a business management degree, decide to venture into the business of selling ice-cream? Blasphemous, you might say, but Saurabh Chopra and Sarvdeep Batra are all set to prove you wrong.
They’ve started a venture called the Sweet Tooth Company recently, and are in the process of creating a lot of “cool drama”, as they say in the ice-cream segment, for Indians. In their view, they are giving the consumer an experience of sorts. Far from the typical ice-creams served at Mother Dairy outlets and far, far, away from the gelatos that people lap up at shopping malls, Chopra and Batra serve us what they call an “international dessert experience”.
But what’s the need, we ask, when they enthusiastically enter the kitchen (we’re at their humble outlet in the Saket colony market in Delhi) to prepare, believe it or not, fried ice-cream, as well as green chilli ice-cream. For our part, we can only say that the camaraderie between the two business partners in the kitchen is remarkable, even as they set out to treat us with their unusual dessert offerings.
As Chopra brings out scoops of ice cream rolled in a lather of crumbled cookies, he tells us how he returned to India after working in business development in the USA. “I thought the dessert market in India was lacking and that’s why I decided to take the plunge,” laughs this graduate of Sri Ram College of Commerce, Delhi, and IIM Lucknow.
The “Sweet Tooth Company was born out of a desire to create a truly international dessert experience in India. There is a considerable lack of affordable dessert options,” he says, while I stare in complete horror as he heats oil in a wok to “dip in the ice-cream”.
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He’s making fried ice-cream, which I’ve tasted only once several years ago in school. Chopra explains why he chose to take the risk of moving out of the US to begin such an outlet (there’s one more in Gurgaon). “At one end of the spectrum you have simple ice cream outlets. At the other end there are five-star hotels that serve you good desserts but are way out of reach for the common person. We want to fill the gap,” he says, as the ice-cream sizzles in the wok.
Batra, who runs an event management company, decided to join him in the enterprise. As we speak, he is busy spreading green chillies onto a layer of ice-cream. Why would you do that, I ask, horrified again at the prospect of eating green chilli ice-cream. But clearly the two know exactly what they’re doing — that’s why they don’t hesitate to experiment.
Both Batra and Chopra are self-confessed foodies and find themselves digging into kormas and kebabs at Karim’s in Old Delhi. Back in their own kitchen, the youngsters are discussing their future plans. While the fried, baked and green chilli ice-creams are already bestsellers (the outlet is crowded when we visit), other favourites are crepes and cheesecakes. The duo is set to launch a line of exotic cakes soon and, by November, the special winter menu at Sweet Tooth will include sizzling brownies, hot apple pies and molten chocolate tarts.
How yum is that?
FAVOURITE RECIPES
Fried Ice-Cream
½ litre vanilla ice-cream
250 gm crushed cookies
250 gm cake, crushed into crumbs
Roll scoops of ice-cream in the cake and cookie crumbs until fully coated. Leave in the freezer overnight for the scoops to become hard. Next day, immerse in boiling oil in a deep pan for a few seconds only. The coating will be hot and fried while the ice-cream inside will be cold and creamy. Serve with caramel sauce.
Green Chilli Ice-Cream
½ litre vanilla ice-cream
100 gm green chillies
Lime juice
Soak finely cut green chillies in lime juice. Spread a layer of ice-cream on a clean, flat surface. Add a layer of chillies. Cover with another layer of ice-cream. Move to an ice-cream container and refreeze in the deep freezer. Scoop out and serve with cold mint sauce.