A date to remember: The Abu Dhabi ice cream maker turning palm trees into soft serve

Goldlaner.com – By the time night falls and the last few customers trickle out of an ice cream parlor tucked behind Abu Dhabi’s Zayed Port, it may seem as though the day’s work is done. But for Amira Al Dosari, it’s just beginning. Her shift starts in the kitchen at 9 p.m., where she spends up to three hours prepping, churning, and tasting 12 different bases before they are transformed into unique batches of premium soft serve.

By morning, a dozen flavors are ready to be served at Al Dosari’s shop, Ice Station — many featuring ingredients that come from an unusualsource: the date palm. The date palm tree is a symbol of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and the dates that grow in bunches on it are one of the country’s most important agricultural exports. Globally, nearly 11 million metric tons of dates were produced in 2024.

Middle Eastern and North African countries, such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt led the way, with the UAE ranking in the top 10, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. Al Dosari, 53, didn’t intend to showcase dates when she founded the store in 2023. That changed after she took ice cream-making courses around the world and saw how reliant many recipes were on ready-made mixes, preservatives, and artificial flavorings.

What concerned her most, however, was the high sugar content. “I was thinking about what the future could be for (children) who eat a lot of sugar when they are that young. How would that affect their body?” she told CNN.

That led her to begin experimenting with kholas rotab — the softest, ripest stage of the kholas variety of date. Its natural sweetness inspired her to rework the original recipe she had opened Ice Station with, this time without adding any sugar. Al Dosari acknowledges that dates are also high in sugar.

But, as a whole fruit, they contain dietary fiber that can slow the absorption of those sugars, unlike refined cane sugar. For her, what matters is that the sweetness comes naturally from the fleshy, dark fruit itself. “The main thing in soft serve is the sugar.

It gives it its creamy texture,” she said. Creating soft serve without added sugar “was the challenge.” After countless attempts and 15 broken machines from her experimentation, Al Dosari created a rotab-flavored ice cream. But she later came to realize that the date palm tree, from its roots to its trunk, could provide ingredients for her ice creams — inspiring 145 flavors over the last three years.

One such flavor is her matcha. Instead of using the Japanese green tea powder, Al Dosari uses date palm leaves, which she says achieve the same flavor profile and vivid green hue. It’s known as “safcha” and it’s a timely substitution: as the world’s appetite for the tea grows, the craze has put mounting pressure on Japan’s supply.

“Every single person in my family is like, ‘matcha, matcha, matcha!’ I said, ‘Okay, but matcha has caffeine, so let’s go for something similar, but with no caffeine.” This Abu Dhabi classic car café is a petrolhead’s paradise Her daughter, Ghalia Al Mazrouei, a sustainability consultant, helped her find a use for the many seeds left over from using dates, brewing them into a caffeine-free coffee. They also pour the drink over a mound of ice cream and brand it an “affogato,” after the Italian dessert of ice cream drowned in espresso. “We know that the entire plant is quite safe for consumption, so it was just more about how we could present this in a way that is enjoyable for everyone?” Al Mazrouei said.

Al Dosari has found culinary uses for the palm’s pollen, creating an entire flavor from it. She uses date molasses to help sweeten her ice creams and discovered that different date varieties can produce different tastes, like that of banana. But the date palm is hardly her only source of inspiration.

Ice Station’s menu has boasted a revolving door of international flavors over the years, from Costa Rican pineapple to ube, the purple sweet potato native to the Philippines. Al Dosari has even swirled savory variations, including smoked salmon with cream cheese, caviar with vanilla, and parmesan with white truffle. “I have so many (ideas),” she said, laughing.

She is currently inventing her 448th flavor. For the founder, her date-laden scoops, however, are about more than innovative flavors; they are a way of turning a traditional ingredient into one of cultural relevancy and regional identity. “All Gulf countries share the same heritage: the palms,” she said.

The date palm can flourish in the arid conditions of the Gulf, where its fruit has sustained communities for centuries and become a symbol of hospitality and generosity. In 2019, UNESCO recognized its significance by adding the date palm to its Intangible Cultural Heritage List. Al Dosari continues to extend that heritage in a frozen-form, reimagining traditional Emirati desserts like “khabisa,” a fragrant mix of roasted flour, ghee and spices, and “rahash,” a sesame-based confection, which she says are a hit with both locals and tourists alike.

She has opened a second branch of Ice Station, but launching her product internationally, has proven difficult. While Ice Station has showcased its flavors at events abroad, including in Uzbekistan and Egypt, and received global franchise enquiries, Al Dosari worries about compromising quality by scaling up. For now, she continues to churn out soft serve with a larger mission: to encourage people to eat more natural ice cream and put Abu Dhabi on the map for premium soft serve, while reminding customers of the legacy they are consuming.

“Food is almost like an international language,” Al Mazrouei said. “You don’t need to have a complete understanding with someone to connect through food.”