Dondurma

Dondurma is Turkish ice cream, and the word on its own now means the Maraş kind: a dense, elastic, slow-melting ice cream from Kahramanmaraş made from goat's or sheep's milk, sugar, salep and mastic, worked with a long metal paddle until it can be stretched like dough, hung from a hook, and cut with a knife. Salep is the dried, ground tuber of wild orchids from the Taurus mountains, and it is the thickener that gives dondurma its chew and its resistance to melting; mastic, the resin of the Chios mastic tree, adds a faint pine note and more stretch. The stuff is so elastic that the traditional way to eat it is with cutlery rather than a spoon, and the vendors who flip it on a rod and snatch it back from the customer are performing a trick that the texture makes possible. Wild salep is scarce and its export is banned, so most dondurma outside Turkey is made with gums and starches and is a looser, softer thing.