Dondurma

Have you ever heard Dondurma before ??? Well if you haven't heard that. Dondurma is the named that given to Ice Cream in Turkey. Flaky ice cream requires delicate attention. Chewy ice cream requires hard work. The traditional Turkish salep dondurma is milk sweetened and flavored with mastic, an aromatic resin, and thickened with salep, the powdered bulbs of several wild orchids. The bulbs contain a mucilaginous carbohydrate called glucomannan, which the orchids use to retain water during dry periods. When dissolved in milk, the long coiled glucomannan chains bind up and block the movement of water molecules, and thicken the milk. Hot salep milk is a drink long esteemed in Turkey and Europe for boosting virility (“salep” comes from the Arabic for “fox testicle”). Salep ice cream was probably discovered when someone accidentally let the salep drink freeze. As the water forms ice crystals and the glucomannan chains become more crowded in the remaining liquid, their coils overlap and bond to form an interconnected network. The dondurma-maker, or a machine built for the purpose, pounds and stretches the ice cream for 20 minutes to organize the network into a dense, elastic mass, just as a breadmaker kneads dough to develop its gluten. Portions of the firm, chewy ice cream are cut with a knife. Genuine salep is expensive and hard to find. But it turns out that the commercial stabilizer guar gum (from the tropical cluster bean) and Japanese konjac flour (from tubers of a taro relative) contain closely related carbohydrates that behave in much the same way as salep glucomannan. Guar gum is sold on specialty-ingredient Web sites, konjac in Japanese groceries.