Istanbul
Not all ice-creams are created equal.
American-style is wealthy in cream and light-weight in texture. Italian gelato is churned slower and served hotter. Indian kulfi is thick and never whipped.
And in Turkey, Maraş dondurma is stretchy like taffy and nearly melt-proof. Its resilience is due to an orchid-based flour known as salep that’s produced in Turkey and Turkey alone.
Most guests’ introduction to the ice-cream’s uncommon properties is thru the antics of road distributors in vacationer hubs akin to Istanbul’s İstiklal Avenue or Ortaköy Square.
Dressed in embroidered waistcoats and purple fezes, conventional costumes from the south-central Kahramanmaraş area the place dondurma was born, they’re half magician and half ice-cream peddler.
Standing over their carts, they use lengthy metallic rods to pound and knead the dondurma like colourful dough, spinning it with the zest of a Naples pizzaiolo.
The present begins when clients strategy, drawn right into a cat-and-mouse recreation the place the rods are used to proffer ice-cream, snatch it away, flip it the other way up and lead the treat-seeker on a merry dance.
What we’re coping with right here is clearly no lily-livered delicate serve, however a cumbersome titan of the frozen dessert world. But to benefit from the best dondurma there’s to supply, it’s finest to present the street-cart performers a miss and head to an artisanal ice-cream parlor.
Serez Gurme Dondurma, a connoisseur ice-cream chain with 9 branches throughout Istanbul, was based in 2010 by Serdar Kemahlı. At his store in Caddebostan, a seaside neighborhood within the Asian a part of town, he tells NCS that his frozen-treat epiphany got here in his mid-40s when he noticed a line outdoors a parlor throughout a go to to a small city on the Aegean coast.
“The people were patient and happy; the adults wore the expressions of children on their faces. But the ice creams in their hands were bright blue, bright yellow, bright green colors that no real fruit and no real nut could ever produce,” he says.
The dondurma of his Nineteen Seventies childhood — when there have been simply two flavors, plain and chocolate, and “the same man who sold ice-cream in summer became the pickle-seller in winter” — had disappeared.
“I was unemployed, but that evening I realized I was not just looking for a job. I was looking for something that had been lost,” he says. Having beforehand labored within the sandwich trade, he turned his thoughts to ice-cream, perfecting his method over a year-long trial-and-error course of earlier than opening his first store.
Intense, agency and clean
At Caddebostan, the most well-liked taste is pistachio; Turkey is among the world’s foremost producers of the light-green nut. Enticing tubs of Madagascar vanilla, chocolate, walnut, Bodrum mandarin and bitter cherry are lined up aspect by aspect, able to be scooped and stacked in gravity-defying towers of ice-cream and sorbet.
The elements are pure and uncooked, with no synthetic flavors or components. It is, with out exaggeration, one of the best ice-cream I’ve ever tasted. It’s strong but creamy, clean and silky however and not using a trace of iciness.
The increased melting level means that it’s served at a hotter temperature than commonplace ice-cream and the flavors hit with a better depth. In the phrases of Willy Wonka, “Lick an orange. It tastes like an orange! The strawberries taste like strawberries!”
If there have been snozzberries on the menu, I’d have snaffled them up too.
Dondurma is historically made with simply milk, beet sugar and salep, which is floor from the bulb of the Dactylorhiza romana orchid, native to southern Europe and northern Africa, and to the mountains of south-central Turkey the place the candy deal with was born. The plant resin mastic can be added to dondurma to extend its elasticity.
Since historical instances, salep has been used to make drinks or different treats. At the Serez Dondurmacısı in Caddebostan, a cup of salep is made all of the extra scrumptious with a sprinkling of cinnamon. It’s as candy and comforting as consuming a bowl of thick scorching chocolate, besides it tastes of vanilla ice-cream, not cocoa.
“What makes salep so valuable is a molecule it contains called glucomannan,” explains Kemahlı. “One gram of glucomannan can bind two hundred times its own weight in water. It is one of the most extraordinary water-binding molecules in nature.”
As an emulsifier and thickener, glucomannan is the “scientific secret” behind dondurma’s stretchy, sliceable construction, he says, and one kilogram of pure salep powder prices upwards of $200.
However, overharvesting has introduced the orchids to the brink of extinction and they’re now protected by the European Union and by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). Exports from Turkey are strictly banned.
The salep orchid has two root tubers and if the harvesters have been to take just one and depart the opposite within the soil, the plant would survive, Kemahlı explains. “Unfortunately, they take both.”
It takes between 1,000 and a couple of,000 orchid vegetation to make one kilo of salep powder and, regardless of being protected underneath worldwide regulation, “every year millions are still uprooted illegally. We have asked of the mountains far more than they can give,” he says.
Artificial salep is now a extensively used various for making ice-cream and salep drinks, though in fact it isn’t a match for the unique. At Serez Gurme Dondurma, they use actual salep, sparingly, and assist sustainable cultivation within the Turhal area.
Fruit is sourced instantly from small farms and Serez Gurme Dondurma takes a zero-tolerance strategy to pesticides, which kill bugs, pollute water and sterilize the microbiology of the soil. At each department of the chain, there are blue folders thick with lab studies exhibiting the purity of the elements.
“I no longer say ‘we make ice cream,’” says Kemahlı. “I say this: ‘We protect what makes ice cream possible. We protect the wild orchid, so that dondurma does not lose its soul. We protect the bee, so that fruit continues to exist. We protect the groundwater, so that milk continues to come from healthy cows.”
In 2025, the meals information StyleAtlas declared dondurma one of the best frozen dessert on this planet. A spokesperson instructed NCS that its “extraordinary thermal resistance” and “resilient chewy texture that distinguishes it from any other frozen confection” makes it a “must-try treat.”
However, whereas ice-cream varieties akin to gelato are a family identify internationally, dondurma is barely recognized outdoors Turkey.
The foremost purpose, in fact, is that true, genuine, dondurma can solely be loved contained in the nation. Travelers would do properly so as to add it to their foodie guidelines, alongside the kebabs and baklava.