The most traditional of the five flavors is the Mastiha, flavored pungently with Chios mastic oil. “We make more of a creamier version of it, while still having some of that chewiness, without it being as chewy and tough as the traditional one.” It’s kind of a meld of all of them,” he says. “We wanted to re-create the experience of chewy, textured ice cream found in Turkey and the Levant. As a result, co-owner Roberto Escobar is quick to qualify that their ice cream, which he says he worked on for two years, isn’t exactly dondurma. Turkey has banned salep exports, so this version is thickened with konjac flour, as well as guar gum, vegetable glycerin, carrageenan gum, and locust-bean gum. Now, though, Lezzetli is poised to be a gateway drug into the world of chewy ice cream. Why this is the case isn’t exactly clear, but Robyn Eckhardt - the author of the EatingAsia blog and the forthcoming Istanbul and Beyond - thinks it probably has to do with the labor involved, and that Maraş-dondurma producers tend to be specialists. The few places that do make it include Bay Ridge’s Cedars Pastry and Las Vegas’s Marash, which has expanded into California. True to the owners’ claims, you can actually chew it, and it has a hint of savoriness and a piney flavor from the resinous mastic.ĭondurma is still exceedingly rare in the U.S. It’s also very dense to the point of almost being tough. All varieties are worked with mallets or paddles during the freezing process, and getting that trademark elasticity means putting in work. Salep, the ground-up tuber of an orchid, thickens it, while mastic or gum arabic lends it elastically and a higher melting point to help withstand the blistering Mediterranean sun. These sweets get their characteristic qualities from plant-derived ingredients. The full name for this ice cream is Maraş dondurma, for the city it purportedly comes from, and it belongs to a family of chewy, dense ice creams also found in the Eastern Mediterranean. That’s all about to change, though: Lezzetli Mediterranean Ice Cream is the first American brand of what its owners call “chewy ice cream.” New York is filled with all sorts of amazing ice-cream creations, but until now, this stretchy Turkish ice cream known as dondurma has been extremely difficult - almost impossible, really - to find Stateside. In Turkey, however, ice-cream vendors can pull, stretch, and toss their ice cream like a Jersey Shore show-off playing games with taffy. Ice cream is many things: Cooling, sweet, quite possibly the most delicious thing ever invented.
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