Dondurma: The stretchy, chewy ice cream that never drips

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Istanbul — 

Not all ice creams are created equal.

American-style is rich in cream and light in texture. Italian gelato is churned slower and served warmer. Indian kulfi is thick and never whipped.

And in Turkey, Maraş dondurma is stretchy like taffy and almost melt-proof. Its resilience is thanks to an orchid-based flour called salep that’s produced in Turkey and Turkey alone.

Most visitors’ introduction to the ice cream’s unusual properties is through the antics of street vendors in tourist hubs such as Istanbul’s İstiklal Avenue or Ortaköy Square.

Dressed in embroidered waistcoats and red fezes, traditional costumes from the south-central Kahramanmaraş region where dondurma was born, they’re part magician and part ice cream peddler.

Standing over their carts, they use long metal rods to pound and knead the dondurma like colorful dough, spinning it with the zest of a Naples pizzaiolo.

The show begins when customers approach, drawn into a cat-and-mouse game where the rods are used to proffer ice cream, snatch it away, flip it upside down and lead the treat-seeker on a merry dance.

What we’re dealing with here is clearly no lily-livered soft serve, but a bulky titan of the frozen dessert world. But to enjoy the finest dondurma there is to offer, it’s best to give the street-cart performers a miss and head to an artisanal ice cream parlor.

Serez Gurme Dondurma, a gourmet ice cream chain with nine branches across Istanbul, was founded in 2010 by Serdar Kemahlı. At his shop in Caddebostan, a seaside neighborhood in the Asian part of the city, he tells CNN that his frozen-treat epiphany came in his mid-40s when he saw a line outside a parlor during a visit to a small town 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 1970s childhood — when there were just 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 previously worked in the sandwich industry, he turned his mind to ice cream, perfecting his formula over a year-long trial-and-error process before opening his first shop.

Intense, firm and smooth

At Caddebostan, the most popular flavor is pistachio; Turkey is one of the world’s main producers of the light-green nut. Enticing tubs of Madagascar vanilla, chocolate, walnut, Bodrum mandarin and sour cherry are lined up side by side, ready to be scooped and stacked in gravity-defying towers of ice cream and sorbet.

The ingredients are natural and raw, with no artificial flavors or additives. It is, without exaggeration, the best ice cream I’ve ever tasted. It’s robust yet creamy, smooth and silky but without a hint of iciness.

The higher melting point means that it’s served at a warmer temperature than standard ice cream and the flavors hit with a greater intensity. In the words of Willy Wonka, “Lick an orange. It tastes like an orange! The strawberries taste like strawberries!”

If there were snozzberries on the menu, I would have snaffled them up too.

Dondurma is traditionally made with just milk, beet sugar and salep, which is ground from the bulb of the Dactylorhiza romana orchid, native to southern Europe and northern Africa, and to the mountains of south-central Turkey where the sweet treat was born. The plant resin mastic is also added to dondurma to increase its elasticity.

Since ancient times, salep has been used to make drinks or other treats. At the Serez Dondurmacısı in Caddebostan, a cup of salep is made all the more delicious with a sprinkling of cinnamon. It’s as sweet and comforting as drinking a bowl of thick hot chocolate, except 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 structure, he says, and one kilogram of pure salep powder costs upwards of $200.

However, overharvesting has brought the orchids to the brink of extinction and they are 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 were to take only one and leave the other in the soil, the plant would survive, Kemahlı explains. “Unfortunately, they take both.”

It takes between 1,000 and 2,000 orchid plants to make one kilo of salep powder and, despite being protected under international law, “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 widely used alternative for making ice cream and salep drinks, although of course it is not a match for the original. At Serez Gurme Dondurma, they use real salep, sparingly, and support sustainable cultivation in the Turhal region.

Fruit is sourced directly from small farms and Serez Gurme Dondurma takes a zero-tolerance approach to pesticides, which kill insects, pollute water and sterilize the microbiology of the soil. At every branch of the chain, there are blue folders thick with lab reports showing the purity of the ingredients.

“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 food guide TasteAtlas declared dondurma the best frozen dessert in the world. A spokesperson told CNN that its “extraordinary thermal resistance” and “resilient chewy texture that distinguishes it from any other frozen confection” makes it a “must-try treat.”

However, while ice cream varieties such as gelato are a household name internationally, dondurma is barely known outside Turkey.

The main reason, of course, is that true, authentic, dondurma can only be enjoyed inside the country. Travelers would do well to add it to their foodie checklist, alongside the kebabs and baklava.