Ophicleide

Thanks for that. That’s a shame, although I suppose I am reassured that it is so hard to buy unlike many unsustainable foods. So I suppose the question is what to use as an alternative. This abstract says “salep is a good source of a stabilizer as glucomannan (17.7-54.6%) and contains starch (5.44-38.7%)”. I presume glucomannan is what we are looking for, and a quick detor via the wikipedia page for that takes me to an article in the NYT which includes the following: Konjac flour strikes me as most similar since it also made from tubers, and so, presumably, has a similar ratio of starch to glucomannan as the orchid tubers. Curiously, it has also become a fad food since 2007: it’s the stuff that those “zero carb; zero calorie” noodles and pastas are made from. You also seem to be able to get a refined version which is the pure glucomannan, although I bet it takes a careful hand not to produce something so stiff it destroys the ice-cream maker! I will have to buy some and experiment...

Dear all, I’ve been trying to broaden out my ice-cream making to some of the middle eastern styles (perhaps in a vain attempt to recreate the magic of my one trip to Bakdash in the Damascus souk!). I started with the Persian receipe from my all-time favourite cookery book: Silk Road Cooking: A Vegetarian Journey by Najmieh Batmanglij which is made without eggs and is flavoured with saffron and rose water, with chucks of frozen cream and pistachio. It also calls for the two usual middle-eastern ice-cream ingredients: mastik and salep / sahleb. Mastik is not too difficult to track down in the UK but I have hit a complete blank with salep. Whilst Turkish supermarkets carry powdered drinking salep, including one by Dr. Oetker, none of them actually seem to contain any real salep, instead being mixtures of dried milk, sugar, cinnamon and some “flavourings”. If I have a look online, there seem to be a few Greek-based ebayers selling whole orchid bulbs which they describe as salep but seeing as the adverts seem to be targetting the alternative health market as much as the culinary ones (“Salep Orchid salip misree Salab Misri for mens stamina, vigour and vitality” is a typical advert!), I’m not sure if these are the right things. Or even if these are legitimately harvested. Preservation of wild orchids is quite a big issue in the UK, although that may be because we have fewer of them than many countries. Does anyone have any suggestions? Or is there something I could use instead? I have a feeling that salep doesn’t have much flavour (unlike the mastik) so it is probably a question of finding a suitably similar starch. Thanks! Jacob