Most Singaporeans over 20 years old have heard of “potong” ice cream. But not many (especially the younger ones) know what it means (is it a brand or a type of ice cream?), how it came about and needless to say, its once glorious past.
Pasteurising the main ingredient, coconut milk. According to Mr Jeffery Yap, director of Hong Kong Creameries, one of the two remaining traditional potong manufacturers in Singapore, most local ice creams are coconut-based. They used to squeeze their own coconut milk, but these days they get it from supplier.
After pasteurizing, the ice cream mix is transferred into a metal container pre-filled with grated coconut bought from the market in the morning. Today they are replenishing the stock of coconut flavoured potong ice cream.
Mr Yap is proud to declare that his company uses real fruits and ingredients rather than artificial flavourings that he claims the bigger manufacturers, which products are sold in the supermarkets, are using. Although the amount of ingredients are not as generous as before (so as to cut cost), they still use whole red beans, for example, and the ingredient fills almost half of a potong ice cream.
The mixture is poured into this mould that makes 40 potong ice cream. It is then submerged into a salt bed of as low as -30 degrees C to freeze up. This takes about 30 minutes. In the old days, the mould was a long rectangular tube which was inserted into a barrel filled with salt water. Mr Yap’s grandparents had to manually rotate the drum until the ice cream freezed up. The readied ice creams were cut into portions, hence the name “potong”, which means “cut” in Malay.
These ice cream sticks are fixed into the mould before the ice creams solidify in the salt bed. According to Mr Ong, a potong ice cream distributor, the first generation potong ice creams were eaten with satay sticks instead.
Potong straight out from the salt bed.
Plastic packaging for the ice cream. In the past, all you would get was a tracing paper wrapped around the block.
Hong Kong Creameries’s entire range of potong ice creams – sweet corn, durian, red bean, yam, chendol, coconut and mango.
No fancy packaging. Only a plain white box with a chop to indicate the flavour. This one says “chocolate” in Chinese.
According to Mr Yap, ice cream straight out from the salt bed may have hardened outside but it is still soft in the core. An ice cream like this melts quickly. Therefore, they would freeze them in this freezer at -27 degrees C before storing them at a higher temperature of -18 degrees C.
Hong Kong Creameries sells an average of 80,000 potong ice creams a month. Business suffers during the rainy season, when his clients, mostly street vendors, have got no customer.
78-year-old Sng Tian Yu, who has been selling ice cream for 60 years, says ice cream in the past tastes much better as ingredients were cheap and ample. He used to make his own ice cream at home and claims to be the one who taught Mr Yap’s auntie how to make potong. He now peddles in the Tampines neighbourhood. Ice cream vendor like him is few and far between as the National Environment Agency has stopped issuing new license. According to Mr Yap, most of his clients are old men. The youngest he has seen so far is in his 40s.
