Monday, August 21, 2006

Turkish Ice Cream a.k.a. Fox Testicel Ice Cream


Yesterday I spent a large portion of the afternoon thinking up and looking for ice cream or sorbet ideas. These are the ones I'm going to try over the next few weeks:

curry ice cream with pistachio nuts
corn ice cream
sage pineapple sorbet
mango habanero sorbet
oatmeal raisin ice cream
roasted banana and cardamon ice cream
chocolate and chili ice cream

Then there is the Orchid Ice cream.

For years now, my husband has been talking about this chewy ice cream he had when he was on a trip to Turkey. I googled chewy ice cream and Turkish ice cream, poked around chowhound. I found it Turkish name, salepi dondurma which translates as fox testicle ice cream. Here is the wikipedia entry. The key ingredient is mastic. This makes it chewy and then salep, the fox testicle part (actually ground up mountain orchid), thickens it and gives it a very specific flavor.

I then read that it is illegal to import salep outside of Turkey because it has been over harvested. Well, the folks at ebay clearly haven't picked up on this as I found someone selling packets of it to mix with hot milk for drinks. It is a very popular drink throughout the middle east and greece. I ordered some, got the mastic on another online greek store food store. When they get here it is Turkish Ice cream time.



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