Ice cream can be cool, sweet, or both. It is possibly the most delicious dessert ever invented.
It is usually not stretchy. It is not, at least in the U.S. However, ice-cream sellers can pull, stretch, and toss their cream like a Jersey Shore star playing with taffy in Turkey. New York is home to many amazing ice-cream flavors, but dondurma, a Turkish ice cream, has been difficult, if not impossible, to find Stateside. That’s all about to change, though: Lezzetli Mediterranean Ice Cream is the first American brand of what its owners call “chewy ice cream.”
Different Country where Dondurma famous for
Maras dondurma is the full name of this ice cream. It comes from the Eastern Mediterranean and belongs to the Maras family of dense, chewy ice creams. These sweets are made from plant-derived ingredients. Salep, which is the dried tuber of an orchid, thickens the sweets. Mastic, or gum arabic, gives it elasticity and a higher melting temperature to withstand the scorching Mediterranean sun. All varieties work with paddles or mallets during the freezing process. These give them that distinctive elasticity. It is also dense, almost to the point that it can be difficult to chew. According to the owners, you can chew it easily.
Dondurma remains extremely rare in the U.S. Few places to make it, including Bay Ridge’s Cedars Pastry in Bay Ridge and Las Vegas’s Marash. Dondruma has since expanded into California. It’s not clear why this is so. Still, Robyn Eckhardt, the author of Eating Asia and the forthcoming Istanbul & Beyond, believes it has to do with labor and that Maras dondurma producers are specialists.
Flavours of Dondurma
Lezzetli, however, is poised to become a gateway drug into chewy ice cream. Turkey banned the export of salep, so this version has konjac flour, vegetable glycerin, and carrageenan gum. Roberto Escobar, the co-owner, quickly clarifies that the ice cream they make, which he claims he made for two years, doesn’t exactly dondurma.
We wanted to recreate the texture and chewiness of ice cream from Turkey and the Levant. He says it’s a combination of all three. “We make a creamier version, but it still retains some of the chewiness without making it as tough and chewy as the original.
Mastiha is the most popular of the five flavors. Mastiha is pungently flavored with Chios Mastic Oil. You might be having difficulty imagining how that tasted. Try something mildly aromatic, such as pistachio-flavored ice cream mixed with pleasant evergreen.
Other flavors include:
- Chios vanilla, named after the Greek island that has its own DOP Mastic and has a milder dose of that mastic.
- Orange blossom-flavored chocolate.
