What Makes Dondurma Stretch: A 200-Year Secret from Kahramanmaraş

The town of Kahramanmaraş sits in the foothills of southern Turkey, at the edge of the Mediterranean climate zone. It has roughly half a million people, a Mamluk-era castle on a hill, and what may be the world's most distinctive ice cream tradition.

The town has been making Maraş ice cream — dondurma — since the 1700s. The technique is unique enough that the European Union granted it protected geographical indication status in 2017, the same kind of legal protection Champagne enjoys.

The ice cream is unlike anything else in the world. It can be stretched like taffy. It can be hung from a hook without falling. It can be cut with a knife and fork. It melts so slowly you can let it sit on a warm afternoon and finish your conversation before it pools. The texture against your tongue is faintly elastic, almost chewy.

The reason is two ingredients: sahlep and mastic.

It can be hung from a hook without falling, cut with a knife and fork, and stretched into a long ribbon — this is ice cream that breaks the rules.

Sahlep

Sahlep is a flour made from the dried, ground tubers of wild mountain orchids — specifically several species of the Orchis genus that grow on the limestone hillsides around Kahramanmaraş, in Konya, and across parts of southern Turkey and northern Greece.

The tubers are dug up by hand, washed, threaded onto strings, dried in the sun, and ground to a fine pale powder. The powder, when mixed with hot liquid, becomes intensely gelatinous — almost like flavourless wallpaper paste, but more elastic. It's what gives dondurma its stretch.

It is also intensely rare. The orchids take 4–7 years to mature. A thousand orchids produce about a kilogram of dried sahlep. Wild populations have collapsed under the demand. In 2004, Turkey banned the export of sahlep — there simply wasn't enough left for the country's own dondurma industry.

What this means in practice: real Maraş-style dondurma is expensive. Sahlep costs roughly $200 per kilogram at wholesale. The handful of shops in Canada that make real dondurma are paying significant import fees and use the ingredient sparingly.

Mastic

The second ingredient is mastic — a clear, slightly bitter resin that drips from a specific kind of evergreen tree, Pistacia lentiscus var. Chia, that grows on the southern part of the Greek island of Chios. Only Chios. The tree grows elsewhere, but only the Chios variety produces the right resin in commercial quantities.

The harvest method is essentially unchanged for two thousand years: workers slice the bark, the resin drips onto clean white powder beneath the tree, and the pieces are collected by hand.

In dondurma, mastic adds a faintly piney, slightly herbal flavour and a small amount of additional chew. It's used in much smaller quantities than sahlep — a pinch of mastic per litre of ice cream — but the contribution to the texture is noticeable.

The pounding

A real Maraş dondurma maker doesn't just freeze the ice cream and serve it. The mixture is poured into a copper vessel, frozen down to a workable consistency, and then pounded with a long wooden stick — sometimes for thirty minutes — to develop the elasticity.

The pounding aerates the mixture and works the sahlep and mastic into the texture. The dondurma is then transferred to a refrigerated metal column where it sits, stretchy and dense, ready for service.

In shops in Kahramanmaraş, the dondurma is served theatrically: the server pulls a long ribbon of ice cream from the column onto a hook, hangs it off a stick, swings it over the customer's head as a joke, and finally places it in a small bowl. The whole performance is a fixture of Turkish food culture.

How to spot the real thing

In Canada, the number of places serving real Maraş-style dondurma can be counted on two hands. Five tells:

1. The stretch. Real dondurma can be pulled into a ribbon by a server with a spoon. If it stays in a scoop, it's not real.
2. The melt. It softens slowly, evenly, and stays scoopable longer than ordinary ice cream.
3. The flavour. Faintly floral, faintly piney. Vanilla shouldn't taste only of vanilla; pistachio should have an undertone of resin.
4. The price. $7–12 per scoop. Cheaper than that, the sahlep isn't really there.
5. The shop. Real dondurma shops know they're serving something special. The owner will tell you about their sahlep source.

For a list of the few real Maraş dondurma shops we've found in Canada, see our city guide.

Why it matters

The story of dondurma is, in miniature, the story of Turkish cuisine: a technique developed over centuries in a specific landscape, depending on ingredients that grow nowhere else, surviving today against industrial pressures because a small community of producers insists on doing it properly.

The next time you eat a scoop — and we hope you do — pay attention. You're eating something that didn't exist anywhere on Earth two hundred years ago, that has been remade by the same families for generations, and that almost disappeared in the last fifty years. It's still here. It's worth the price.