The flower of frozen desserts

Natural History, April, 1997 by Eric Hansen

In Mohammed's office, I saw a framed photograph of a boy jumping rope. Mohammed wasted no time pointing out that the thick white rope was a length of orchid ice cream. Clearly, this was a dessert to be reckoned with.

For the next two days Mohammed and I drove around in the mountains looking for orchids in bloom. It was early spring and as we traveled through swampy meadows and grasslands, we found large populations of orchids, but none in flower. We continued our drive along precipitous mountain tracks until we finally began to see plants putting up their flowering spikes.

We left the vehicle and climbed through open pine woods and across rocky slopes. At the base of a pine tree, we came upon our first orchid, Orchis provincialis. Five pale yellow flowers were clustered along the loose flower spike. Farther along, the plants became quite numerous, the flowers distinguished by long, thin, upward-pointing spurs.

Mohammed dug up a plant to show me the twin tubers. One: slightly discolored and withered, was from the previous year. The other tuber was fresh and white, and this is the one that is collected. The villagers wash the fresh tubers and then immerse them in hot water for about fifteen minutes to soften and help loosen the outer skin. The tubers are then threaded on strings and dried in the sun for about a week. Mohammed calculated that about two pounds of fresh orchid tubers weigh about ten ounces when dry.

All salep used in ice cream comes from wild plants. Species of Ophrys, Himantoglossum, and Serapias are used, but the most commonly collected tubers are in the genus Orchis, including O. provincialis, O. anatolica, and O. morio.

Local people claim that the orchids are abundant and that this is why no one has made a serious attempt to artificially propagate them in nurseries. Mohammed's level of production requires approximately 2.5 tons of dried orchid tubers each year. He has no problem obtaining this quantity locally, and when I asked what effect his ice-cream business had on the wild orchid population, he responded that the mountains were still covered with the plants. According to Mohammed, the collecting areas, and the species used, change from year to year, depending on the rainfall; and that fluctuating weather patterns prevent any one habitat from being overcollected.

Others in Turkey are concerned about the overcollection of orchid species, and this has encouraged researchers at Ankara University to start looking into the possibility of growing terrestrial orchids as a farm crop. A longer-term project involves the search for a suitable chemical substitute for salep.

Back in Maras, Mohammed introduced me to Mehmet Adnan Dedeoglu, who runs a wholesale business in salep flour, morel mushrooms, beeswax, cologne, cooking oil, and fox skins. Mehmet brought out strands of dried tubers for me to look at. He depends on villagers and nomadic shepherds to bring him salep, which he grades and then sells loose, on strings, or in powdered form. Most people prefer to buy the dried tubers because some dealers cut the salep flour with inferior ingredients. The best-quality tuber is known as salepli Maras. It comes from the mountains and sells for about twenty-one dollars per pound.