Back from Gaziantep and already missing its colourful bazaars and all the delicious food we ate there. Too much of it mind you, but there is one thing we all agreed on, and this was that we couldn’t have too much of Ozgüler’s ice cream.

Turkish, as well as Syrian and Lebanese ice cream is very different from regular gelato or western ice cream. For one thing, it never has any eggs in it. Instead, it is thickened with salep, a powder ground from dried orchis tubers that not only thickens the ice cream (and a milk drink called salep or sahlab in Arabic) but also makes it stretchy and chewy. A strange texture that I love but that some people simply don’t care for.

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