The weather is gradually warming up, and though summer is still a few months away, it’s got us looking forward to sunny days and cold ice cream.
Imagine, however, if that wonderful sweet stuff didn’t melt in the sweltering sun. For people in Turkey, particularly in the southern city of Kahramanmaraş, they don’t have to imagine.
Known as Dondurma, or Maraş Dondurma, this Turkish ice cream is consumed by the ton. Made out of a resin called Mastic, coming from the Mastic tree, it’s stretchy, it’s sticky, oh, and it doesn’t melt.
To achieve this popular mixture, you typically add the usual suspects like milk (often goat’s milk in this case), cream and sugar. But the secret ingredient for dondurma is a substance called salep – the ground-up root of a wild orchid. This last component is the thickening agent and makes the substance almost rubbery.
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The stretchiness also comes from the ice cream being beaten, churned and kneaded like dough. Although there are now large machines that can do this for you, purists maintain the need to do it by hand. To serve dondurma, it is hacked at with a knife rather than scooped like conventional ice cream.
Dondurma is the Turkish word for “freezing” as well as the unique ice cream.
Though the main attraction is the taste and uniqueness of dondurma, the elastic substance also helps ice cream vendors with their showmanship. In Kahramanmaraş, vendors regularly twirl the ice cream and use sleight of hand and decoys to tease the customer with their ice cream, only to snatch it back like a magic show.
This is just one of the many global interpretations of ice cream. Want to find out about more? Just check out our full video below!
