Last weekend was my third time visiting Chicago, but my first visit during a time of year when the exterior environment was hospitable to human life. Fortunately for me, it also coincided with the annual Turkish Festival in Daley Plaza.
Of all the outings that Katherine and I planned before my visit, this was probably the one I insisted on the most, even though in some ways it was hardly a break from what I’ve been doing in New York. Chase moved to Atlantic Avenue in March, and a Middle Eastern restaurant of some sort seems to occupy almost every fourth storefront on his stretch of the avenue. As a result I’ve discovered a new favorite food in the “Crazy Fatoosh” sandwich available at Fatoosh (a huge, fluffy pita wrapped around four salads of your choice), I’ve spent so much time wandering the aisles at Sahadi’s that I think they’re going to start asking questions soon, and I’ve probably consumed about three tons of hummus.
So the Turkish Festival in Chicago offered a lot of familiar (and beloved) items: grilled kebabs, hummus drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with paprika, herbed eggplant salad, and flaky spinach pie. But it also had something I’d never tried, something that turned out to be nothing quite like anything I’d ever tried before: Turkish ice cream, or dondurma.
The sign in front of the ice cream stand claimed that the crucial ingredient in dondurma is orchid, so I expected it to have a floral, soapy taste like the lavender ice cream I loved to get in Paris. But, I eventually discovered, orchid does not contribute to the taste of the ice cream: in fact, powdered orchid root (or salep) is used to give the final product a distinctive chewy texture. Yes, chewy.
At the festival, tubs of dondurma were loaded into a cylindrical container and then pummeled into submission by a man with a sharp stick, presumably to soften it slightly. Once he deemed it ready to serve, he used the stick to extract a rectangular slab of the stuff (this ice cream is not conducive to scooping), which he stuck vertically in a waffle cone, and dipped in crushed pistachios. The consistency reminded me of one of those trademarked goops that were all the rage when I was about eight – was “Gak” the one that stretches into long strings when you pull it slowly, but breaks clean if you pull it apart fast? Turkish ice cream is pretty much the same idea. But instead of smelling like chemicals and presumably tasting similarly, it has a mild and creamy vanilla flavor, delicately sweetened and light enough for you to want to eat a whole lot of it.
Unfortunately, it seems that dondurma is very difficult to find in the United States, because of the rarity and high cost of the salep powder that creates its essential characteristics. Internet searches have turned up recipes that substitute cornstarch, which, for those of you with ice cream makers, might be easier than a trip to Turkey. But I’m determined to find some of the real thing somewhere in this city, not only to satisfy my own addiction, but to introduce dondurma to everyone I know: the texture is something truly foreign to most American tongues, and certainly worth experiencing.
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