A baklava crawl within the Turkish metropolis that is obsessive about the pastry

GAZIANTEP, Turkey — When visiting this historic southern Turkish metropolis, it does not take lengthy to find its true ardour: baklava.

A lot in order that Gaziantep has turn into synonymous with the candy pastry, fabricated from a number of layers of phyllo dough, stuffed with nuts and soaked in syrup or honey.

Outlets throughout the town are adorned in inexperienced and gold — inexperienced for pistachios, gold for the dessert’s flakey crust. Acres and acres of pistachio groves encompass the town. Even on the airport, sculptures of the beloved seeds line the curbs exterior the terminals.

Baklava isn’t distinctive to Gaziantep, and the town does not declare its origins. The pastry is feted in native cuisines of many nations, from Iran to Greece to Algeria. However no metropolis has made baklava right into a vacationer attraction, an enormous business and a public obsession fairly like Turkey’s Gaziantep.

NPR just lately toured the town — together with Mustafa Bayram, a professor of meals engineering at Gaziantep College — to seek out out: What’s it that has this place so entranced by this sticky delight?

The OG: Gulluoglu

The primary cease was a retailer in Elmaci bazaar, tucked between a 14th century mosque and outlets promoting dried peppers, eggplants and colourful spices. Gulluoglu is a quaint, slender store run by two brothers, 43-year-old Cevdet and 37-year-old Murat Gullu. They are saying they’re the sixth era of a baklava-making household, and boast that theirs is the oldest baklava store in Turkey, opened in 1871.

“Our customers come here with their grandkids and tell us that their grandfathers had brought them here to this shop to eat baklava when they were young,” says Cevdet Gullu.

The best way they inform it, within the mid-1800s, their great-great-great grandfather Gullu Celebi set out for the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. On his means, he traveled in a caravan passing the cities Aleppo and Damascus in Syria, the place he seen outlets promoting a walnut-filled model of the pastry.

Again in his hometown, then often known as Antep, baklava had been primarily made at dwelling. However seeing these Syrian shops led Gullu Celebi to cook dinner up a marketing strategy.

“When they come back to Antep they made the version they had seen in the stores in Aleppo and Damascus, but over time and with their experience, and with using local ingredients from Antep, they created the Gaziantep baklava we know today,” Murat Gullu says.

They developed a model with thinner layers, used sugar syrup as a substitute of honey and molasses and finally pistachios as a substitute of walnuts, he explains, “because there was an abundance of pistachios available here, whereas walnuts came [from] nearby cities,” he explains.

In the end, professor Bayram says, the Gaziantep baklava recognized at this time was formed by the native components, the ambiance and local weather of the town — and by native cooks who had been consumed with perfecting the recipe and handed that obsession alongside to their apprentices.

“There are four key ingredients: durum wheat flour, clarified butter [ghee] from sheep milk yogurt, sugar, and pistachios that are harvested a month before maturing, when their oil content is high and their color is bold green and flavor is robust and sweet,” Bayram says.

“The decades of developing baklava reached its peak in 1940,” says Murat Gullu. “And that’s the recipe we are using today.”

A plate carrying 4 sorts of baklava seems. There’s the diamond-shaped traditional; a bright-green dolama, by which a layer of phyllo is stuffed with pistachio mud and rolled; sobiyet, which is sort of a turnover overflowing with pistachios; and eventually, bulbul yuvasi, meant to appear to be a chook’s nest, with out filling however with a beneficiant sprinkling of uncooked pistachio mud on high.

Earlier than taking a chunk, the hosts say to odor it.

“You can smell the clarified butter, the pistachios and the dough all together,” says Bayram.

There is a particular solution to eat it too — by holding it the wrong way up. “So that the syrupy bottom part hits the roof of your mouth, and the flakey crust falls on your tongue. Otherwise the thin crust will stick to the roof of the mouth,” says Murat Gullu.

It seems, correct Gaziantep baklava has a sound, too.

“When you bite into it or break a piece off with your fork, you should hear the sound huhsh — that means the baklava layers are thin. If it makes a cracking sound like, ‘chuht,’ it means the dough is thick, and that’s not Gaziantep baklava,” Gullu says.

On the primary chunk of the traditional diamond baklava — holding it the wrong way up, after all — that sound is obvious, and sensations surge. It is stunning how the morsel dissolves in your tongue, with out hardly chewing. The flavors of roasted ghee and daring, shiny pistachios are a delight. And you’re feeling a punch from the sugar, which the specialists say is critical for the structural integrity of the pastry.

Every of the 4 varieties affords its personal expertise, from style to texture, regardless that the components are the identical.

It is not simply the baklava-makers who’re obsessive about the pastry.

“Baklava has a significant ceremonial and cultural role in this city,” says Cevdet Gullu. “We take it to engagements, weddings, funerals. It’s the ultimate gift and souvenir. Not a plane flies from here that isn’t carrying several boxes of baklava. We get visitors from all over Turkey and all over the world.”

With a contemporary twist: Celebiogullari

It is time to see how baklava is made. The tour heads to the manufacturing facility of Celebiogullari, a more recent baklava-maker. Its founder Mehmet Ciftci apprenticed for years working with the highest baklava masters. “It takes at least eight years to learn how to make baklava,” Ciftci says.

He’s doing one thing a bit completely different right here: The baklava he makes is much less candy, he has performed round with among the shapes, and even makes a gluten-free model and a vegan one, with coconut butter as a substitute of ghee.

Contained in the manufacturing facility, it’s a sight to behold. It virtually appears like a cross between a army facility and a home of worship. Ninety boys and males are hustling at their stations. There’s an entire fleet stretching out the dough in order that it is thinner than paper, silky and see-through. The air is roofed in white mud of flour and starch. There’s an individual whose solely job is to splash ghee between layers of filo dough. One other spreads the thinnest layer of cream. One other handles the pistachio filling. And on it goes till a tray of baklava is able to be baked in an oakwood-fired stone oven.

Boys as younger as 10 are shuffling round, carrying trays of flour, starch and pistachios — undistracted by this reporting crew’s presence. They’re a part of an apprenticeship program that offers them faculty credit score and a certificates in the event that they select to open their very own baklava store sooner or later. Right here, they do not solely discover ways to make baklava, but in addition self-discipline and etiquette.

“This is how we keep this trade alive,” Ciftci says. “When I was 7 years old, my mother sent me to learn from baklava chefs, and when we misbehaved or made mistakes they would hit us with sticks. But today, we are teaching the young ones to love the trade.”

Instagram-worthy, however legit: Kocak

Subsequent on the tour is Kocak, which has turn into the largest identify in Gaziantep baklava, recognized throughout Turkey and overseas. It feels glitzy and glamorous right here, and positively a vacationer hotspot. However when NPR meets the proprietor and chef Coskun Kocak, it turns into clear that there’s one other stage of baklava-obsessed grasp chef.

“We keep growing, in fact we can’t stop it. There is a huge demand for real Gaziantep baklava,” Kocak says.

The model’s huge progress and success weigh on Kocak, who says he’s saved up at evening worrying over the standard and way forward for baklava making. He is important of the various mass-producing baklava makers within the metropolis who use machines as a substitute of people.

“There are hundreds of baklava-makers in Gaziantep,” Kocak says. “But you won’t find more than five who are making it the right way, the original way.”

“Making baklava is an art, and it’s under threat,” Kocak says. He is speaking about modernization and local weather change, each of that are affecting the standard of the important thing uncooked components.

With trendy methods, farmers have discovered the way to harvest the pistachios yearly as a substitute of the standard every-other-year cycle, he explains. “But that changes the taste of the pistachio, each year it becomes less and less delicious,” Kocak says. “The same goes for our ghee, which is made from the milk of sheep grazing on local endemic plants, but the area for their grazing is shrinking each year.”

Kocak needs to maintain the corporate’s progress in examine, resisting calls to open a second department. He says he is dedicated to sustaining Gaziantep’s authentic methodology of constructing baklava, which he sees as excellent.

“If you have even the slightest change in ingredient quality, it won’t be Antep baklava anymore,” Kocak says.

The place Syrian and Turkish traditions meet: Mahrouseh

The ultimate cease on this baklava crawl is to a store known as Mahrouseh, run by a Syrian refugee household from Aleppo, who had a sweets store again dwelling, and needed to flee to Turkey when the Syrian civil battle broke out.

Turkey is internet hosting the most important variety of Syrian refugees on this planet, some 3 million in response to the United Nations. Lots of them have settled in Gaziantep, simply 60 miles from Aleppo.

One noticeable distinction at this retailer, professor Mustafa Bayram factors out, is there are a lot of sorts of desserts being offered right here, from desserts, cookies, baklava and varied different Syrian sweets.

“In Gaziantep, typically a baklava shop only has baklava. If you want cakes or other things you have to go somewhere else,” Bayram says. “This is a great thing that Syrians have brought from their own culture to this city.”

“If you’re only going to do one thing, you have to be very confident in it,” says Abdulrahman Hallaq with amusing, as he serves prospects. “We like to offer our customers a variety they can choose from.”

A few of the variations are apparent. The store’s baklava appears to be like drier and extra structured than the opposite Antep counterpart. The feel is crunchy and chewy and the style is much less candy.

However there’s at the very least one similarity. “They are using Turkish pistachios instead of Syrian ones,” Bayram says, stating the colour. Certainly, the pistachios are Gaziantep’s trademark shiny inexperienced.

“Because of restrictions on pistachio imports in Turkey, they had to use local ones instead of the Syrian pistachio which has a more yellow hue and a different taste,” Bayram says.

“We use less syrup, compared to the local baklava, and since we are making it here and not in Syria, it does end up tasting quite different from the ones we had in Syria,” Hallaq says. “But it’s a good thing.”

“We [Turks] learned from them [Syrians] and they learned from us,” Bayram says.

“Just like how centuries ago, when great cuisines were formed by cross-cultural interactions, we are living it again today. When Syrian refugees return home, they will take back what they learned from us and we will use what they left for us here.”

“And perhaps 10, 20 years from now there will be a new food culture born out of this coexistence,” Bayram says.

And who is aware of what varieties of latest and scrumptious recipes will likely be found then.