By Samin Nosrat
- Total Time
- 20 minutes, plus several hours’ freezing
- Rating
- 4(131)
- Notes
- Read community notes
Faloodeh is an ancient Persian dessert, a sort of granita threaded with rice noodles and spiked with rose water and lime. Though you may typically cook noodles until al dente, you’ll need to really cook them through here before adding them to the syrup so that they soak up enough liquid to become as crunchy as possible as they freeze. In Iran, most ice cream shops sell just two items: traditional saffron ice cream and faloodeh, which is typically topped with bottled lime juice that tastes mostly of citric acid. Faloodeh has been my favorite since childhood, but now I prefer it with the juice of freshly squeezed limes. It’s incredibly refreshing and the ideal end to a rich meal filled with complex flavors.
Featured in: Samin Nosrat’s Essential Persian Recipes
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Ingredients
Yield:6 to 8 servings
- 1cup granulated sugar
- Fine sea salt
- ⅓cup lime juice, plus wedges, for serving (about 3 to 4 limes)
- 2tablespoons rose water
- 4ounces very thin rice noodles or rice vermicelli
Ingredient Substitution Guide
Nutritional analysis per serving (8 servings)
151 calories; 0 grams fat; 0 grams saturated fat; 0 grams trans fat; 0 grams monounsaturated fat; 0 grams polyunsaturated fat; 37 grams carbohydrates; 0 grams dietary fiber; 25 grams sugars; 1 gram protein; 126 milligrams sodium
Note: The information shown is Edamam’s estimate based on available ingredients and preparation. It should not be considered a substitute for a professional nutritionist’s advice.
Preparation
Step
1
Place ½ cup water in a small saucepan and set over low heat. Add about half the sugar and stir to dissolve completely. Add ⅛ teaspoon salt and the rest of the sugar and continue stirring until completely dissolved. Take off the heat and let cool to room temperature.
Step
2
In a freezer-safe bowl or dish, stir together 4 cups water, cooled syrup, lime juice and rose water, then place in freezer until ice crystals begin to form on the edges of the mixture, about 1 hour.
Step
3
In a medium pot, bring 4 quarts water to a boil. Add the noodles and cook thoroughly until there is no bite left, about 8 minutes or as instructed on the package. Drain and rinse immediately with cold water. Use scissors to cut noodles into 1-inch pieces, then stir them into the partly frozen syrup mixture. It’s important that the mixture has begun to freeze before adding the noodles so that they don’t all sink to the bottom of the dish, so if your syrup mixture needs more time, freeze for another hour before adding noodles.
Step
4
Every hour for the next several hours, scrape the granita thoroughly with a fork to prevent huge icy chunks from forming. The mixture should be light and airy, punctuated with crunchy noodles.
Step
5
To serve, scrape and serve bowlfuls of faloodeh with lime wedges.
Ratings
4
out of 5
131
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Cooking Notes
Prakash Nadkarni
Good recipe. The Indian version, Falooda, adapted from faloodeh by the Mughals, is also worth trying. This is a Milk/Ice-cream sundae (usually with some of the milk concentrated by cooking or substituted with condensed milk) with vermicelli. It's typical flavored with rose syrup. Like some Iranian faloodeh variants, it contains hydrated sweet basil seeds (which absorb about 4-5 times their weight in water after soaking). See the Wikipedia article.
Apoorva
You do know that the Mughals were Persian right?
shravani
I am sorry Apoorva is wrong, Mughals are not Persians. They are Mongols.
Alan Divack
We love this recipe and have made it many times over the past year. However we have found that we prefer more concentrated flavors -- we use 5 fl oz sugar, in the syrup and only dilute it with 2 cups of water, and then season with 1/3 cup lime and 3 tablespoons rosewater. (And for this quantity of syrup, 2 oz of noodles.) When we scrape it seems to keep growing and serves at least 8! And we also dye it pink by adding 4-5 drops of red food coloring to the syrup because why not?
Usha
I’ve only eaten the Indian version and consider it food for the Gods. I’m sure the Persian version is absolutely divine too. Love the scent of rose water.
PMK
Absolutely delicious and refreshing. I made this for a dinner party almost exactly as written. (I was about 1 tablespoon short of rose water so made up the difference with orange blossom water.) I recommend freezing the liquid in a 9x13 metal cake pan, which makes the scraping easy. I ended up with a fluffy, snowy mixture. Per similar recipe in “Bottom of the Pot” I garnished each with about 1 Tablespoon roasted rhubarb (chilled) - a perfect complement. It served 8; could have served 12.
Lori B
How do you measure 5 fluid ounces of sugar?
Baris Gencel
the Mughals were an eclectic race of people who spread across Central and Southeast Asia. ... Ethnically Turks, the Mughals regarded Persian culture as the epitome of refinement, making Persian the court and administrative language
Alan Divack
We love this recipe and have made it many times over the past year. However we have found that we prefer more concentrated flavors -- we use 5 fl oz sugar, in the syrup and only dilute it with 2 cups of water, and then season with 1/3 cup lime and 3 tablespoons rosewater. (And for this quantity of syrup, 2 oz of noodles.) When we scrape it seems to keep growing and serves at least 8! And we also dye it pink by adding 4-5 drops of red food coloring to the syrup because why not?
Srei
Faloodeh is a very traditional dessert VERY different from the ice cream that requires milk. Unfortunately in the 30 years I have been living in the US, I haven’t been able to taste a Faloodeh that is even close to the ones you taste in Iran.I make me homemade faloodeu with the rice vermicell ( noodle) as this recipe instructs ( this is a very good recipe). This is as close as I have been able to try making Faloodeh, but still it’s not the real thing:/
Moge
I love Faloodeh but making it is a difficult process for the inexperienced person. This recepie was promising but not what I am used to. To start with, I would use only 2 cups of water. Faloodeh is not meant to be soupy! Also you will have to create shaved ice not just partly frozen water. I will try another recepie that calls for using an ice cream maker. I am sure with persistence I can figure it out.
PMK
Absolutely delicious and refreshing. I made this for a dinner party almost exactly as written. (I was about 1 tablespoon short of rose water so made up the difference with orange blossom water.) I recommend freezing the liquid in a 9x13 metal cake pan, which makes the scraping easy. I ended up with a fluffy, snowy mixture. Per similar recipe in “Bottom of the Pot” I garnished each with about 1 Tablespoon roasted rhubarb (chilled) - a perfect complement. It served 8; could have served 12.
Ferguson
This took much longer to freeze than I thought it would. I think you might need to have grown up eating this; nostalgia might help. It seemed to me to be a lovely granita with weird things in it. I am going to defrost it and strain out the noodles.
naomi
I was curious about this recipe, and I'm super happy I made it! I couldn't find heckshered kosher rose water, so I used 3 rose-chai tea bags in the sugar syrup solution. I found that everything took MUCH longer to freeze than I thought it would: I had chilled the sugar syrup for a full day before mixing everything. I suggest making the sugar syrup a day before, and starting the freezing process on a morning when you can be home all day. Also, use a shallow container! Very worth it.
Usha
I’ve only eaten the Indian version and consider it food for the Gods. I’m sure the Persian version is absolutely divine too. Love the scent of rose water.
Prakash Nadkarni
Good recipe. The Indian version, Falooda, adapted from faloodeh by the Mughals, is also worth trying. This is a Milk/Ice-cream sundae (usually with some of the milk concentrated by cooking or substituted with condensed milk) with vermicelli. It's typical flavored with rose syrup. Like some Iranian faloodeh variants, it contains hydrated sweet basil seeds (which absorb about 4-5 times their weight in water after soaking). See the Wikipedia article.
Apoorva
You do know that the Mughals were Persian right?
shravani
I am sorry Apoorva is wrong, Mughals are not Persians. They are Mongols.
Prakash Nadkarni
Shravani is right: "Mughal" is a corruption of "Mongol". The 1st Mughal emperor, Babur, born in Uzbekistan, claimed descent from both Timur and Genghis Khan.The Mughals DID adopt Persian culture wholesale, including the language (made official) and cuisine: many Indian ingredients (paneer) and recipes (biryani, kebab, halva) have Perso-Turkic names, Until the mid-1800s educated Indians studied Sanskrit and Persian, like Europeans learned Latin and Classical Greek.
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