KO EN Turkish Dessert⏱ 65 minEdit history

Dondurma (Ice Cream Thickened with Salep and Mastic)

Name: Dondurma (Ice Cream Thickened with Salep and Mastic)
Prep time: 40 min
Cook time: 25 min
Total time: 1 h 5 min
Yield: 6 servings
Cuisine: Turkish
Ingredients: 1 L goat's milk; 200 g sugar; 10 g salep powder; 1 g mastic; pistachios

Turkey's ice cream, named after Maraş. Goat's milk and sugar are cooked thick with salep and mastic, then frozen. Salep is the dried, powdered tuber of wild orchids, and its polysaccharide makes the ice cream dense and chewy, so that it cuts with a knife rather than scoops and stretches as you eat it. What holds it together is not the ice alone.

Ingredients

6servings

Dondurma (about 1 litre)
goat's milk · or whole cow's milk1 L
sugar200 g
salep powder · hard to find; otherwise 5g konjac powder10 g
mastic · three or four small tears1 g
To serve
pistachios · chopped; or berries in season

Steps

Pound the mastic fine in a mortar with 1 tsp of the sugar. On its own it sticks to the mortar and clumps.
Mix the salep powder evenly with 3 tbsp of the sugar while both are dry. Straight into milk it goes lumpy.
Warm the milk with the rest of the sugar, sprinkling in the salep and sugar a little at a time as you whisk.
Cook over low heat, stirring constantly for 20 minutes and scraping the bottom, until it coats the back of a spoon thickly.
⏲ 20 min
Off the heat, stir in the ground mastic until it melts. Cool, press cling film onto the surface, and chill for at least 4 hours.
⏲ 240 min
Churn in an ice cream machine for 25-30 minutes.
⏲ 30 min
Scrape it into a tub and work it with a stiff spatula for 5 minutes, lifting it, stretching it and folding it back down. Freeze for an hour, then work it again. Do this two or three times.
⏲ 5 min
Take it out 10 minutes before serving and cut it into pieces with a knife. Scatter with pistachios.
⏲ 10 min

Tips & Variations

Variations

Maraş ice cream: the name it goes by inside Türkiye too. Dondurma is also simply the Turkish word for ice cream.
With cow's milk: goat's milk is the original. Whole cow's milk gives the same texture and a milder flavour.
Without mastic: the scent goes and the chew is a little less tough. Salep alone still makes it stretch.
Salep, the drink: the same powder stirred into milk and honey and cooked gives Türkiye's winter drink, also called salep. It is this recipe stopped at step four.
To serve: pistachio is the usual, and fruit is often frozen into it. The photograph is cut and served with berries.

Tips

Ice is not the only thing holding this ice cream together. Gelato sorts desserts by what sets them: "Panna cotta uses gelatine, crème brûlée uses egg protein, gelato uses ice." Dondurma has something on top that list does not hold. Korean Wikipedia describes salep as the powdered tuber of an orchid containing a starchy polysaccharide, glucomannan, and credits salep and mastic with dondurma's dense, chewy texture. That is why it cuts with a knife and stretches as you eat it.
No salep? Start with half the weight of konjac powder. True salep comes from wild orchids and is hard to find. Konjac powder is the same polysaccharide, glucomannan. Start at half the weight of salep and add more if the cooked base does not coat the back of a spoon.
Mix the powder with sugar first. Gelato's rule for milk powder holds here: "the sugar crystals hold the particles apart." Sprinkled straight into milk, salep or konjac swells on the outside and leaves dry lumps inside.
Work it, do not whip it. Gelato warns against long churning — "beyond that you are whipping in air, which adds volume and dilutes flavour." Dondurma goes further and works the ice cream with a spatula once it is out of the machine to make it denser. The point is to press it together, not to lighten it.
Mastic is not only a scent. As lokum says of the same ingredient, "Mastic changes the chew as well as the smell." Keep it to 1g a batch; more and it tastes of resin.
The twenty minutes of cooking are half the texture. Salep needs heat and stirring to open up. Short of that, the frozen result stretches less.