GAZIANTEP, Turkey — When visiting this historical southern Turkish city, it doesn't take long to discover its true passion: baklava.
So much so that Gaziantep has become synonymous with the sweet pastry, made of several layers of phyllo dough, filled with nuts and soaked in syrup or honey.
Shops across the city are adorned in green and gold — green for pistachios, gold for the dessert's flakey crust. Acres and acres of pistachio groves surround the city. Even at the airport, sculptures of the beloved seeds line the curbs outside the terminals.
Baklava is not unique to Gaziantep, and the city doesn't claim its origins. The pastry is feted in local cuisines of many countries, from Iran to Greece to Algeria. But no city has made baklava into a tourist attraction, a vast industry and a public obsession quite like Turkey's Gaziantep.
NPR recently toured the city — along with Mustafa Bayram, a professor of food engineering at Gaziantep University — to find out: What is it that has this place so entranced by this sticky delight?
The OG: Gulluoglu
The first stop was a store in Elmaci bazaar, tucked between a 14th century mosque and shops selling dried peppers, eggplants and colorful spices. Gulluoglu is a quaint, narrow shop run by two brothers, 43-year-old Cevdet and 37-year-old Murat Gullu. They say they're the sixth generation of a baklava-making family, and boast that theirs is the oldest baklava shop 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 way they tell it, in the mid-1800s, their great-great-great grandfather Gullu Celebi set out for the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. On his way, he traveled in a caravan passing the cities Aleppo and Damascus in Syria, where he noticed shops selling a walnut-filled version of the pastry.
Back in his hometown, then known as Antep, baklava had been mainly made at home. But seeing those Syrian stores led Gullu Celebi to cook up a business plan.
"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 version with thinner layers, used sugar syrup instead of honey and molasses and eventually pistachios instead of walnuts, he explains, "because there was an abundance of pistachios available here, whereas walnuts came [from] nearby cities," he explains.
Ultimately, professor Bayram says, the Gaziantep baklava known today was shaped by the local ingredients, the atmosphere and climate of the city — and by local chefs who were consumed with perfecting the recipe and passed that obsession along 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 four kinds of baklava appears. There's the diamond-shaped classic; a bright-green dolama, in which a layer of phyllo is filled with pistachio dust and rolled; sobiyet, which is like a turnover overflowing with pistachios; and finally, bulbul yuvasi, meant to look like a bird's nest, without filling but with a generous sprinkling of raw pistachio dust on top.
Before taking a bite, the hosts say to smell it.
"You can smell the clarified butter, the pistachios and the dough all together," says Bayram.
There's a specific way to eat it too — by holding it upside down. "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 turns out, proper 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 first bite of the classic diamond baklava — holding it upside down, of course — that sound is clear, and sensations surge. It's surprising how the morsel dissolves on your tongue, without hardly chewing. The flavors of roasted ghee and bold, bright pistachios are a delight. And you feel a punch from the sugar, which the experts say is necessary for the structural integrity of the pastry.
Each of the four varieties offers its own experience, from taste to texture, even though the ingredients are the same.
It's not just the baklava-makers who are obsessed with 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 modern twist: Celebiogullari
It's time to see how baklava is made. The tour heads to the factory of Celebiogullari, a newer baklava-maker. Its founder Mehmet Ciftci apprenticed for years working with the top baklava masters. "It takes at least eight years to learn how to make baklava," Ciftci says.
He is doing something a bit different here: The baklava he makes is less sweet, he has played around with some of the shapes, and even makes a gluten-free version and a vegan one, with coconut butter instead of ghee.
Inside the factory, it is a sight to behold. It almost feels like a cross between a military facility and a house of worship. Ninety boys and men are hustling at their stations. There's a whole fleet stretching out the dough so that it's thinner than paper, silky and see-through. The air is covered in white dust of flour and starch. There's a person whose only job is to splash ghee between layers of filo dough. Another spreads the thinnest layer of cream. Another handles the pistachio filling. And on it goes until a tray of baklava is ready to be baked in an oakwood-fired stone oven.
Boys as young as 10 are shuffling around, carrying trays of flour, starch and pistachios — undistracted by this reporting team's presence. They are part of an apprenticeship program that gives them school credit and a certificate if they choose to open their own baklava shop one day. Here, they don't only learn how to make baklava, but also 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, but legit: Kocak
Next on the tour is Kocak, which has become the biggest name in Gaziantep baklava, known all over Turkey and abroad. It feels glitzy and glamorous here, and definitely a tourist hotspot. But when NPR meets the owner and chef Coskun Kocak, it becomes clear that there is another level of baklava-obsessed master chef.
"We keep growing, in fact we can't stop it. There is a huge demand for real Gaziantep baklava," Kocak says.
The brand's massive growth and success weigh on Kocak, who says he is kept up at night worrying over the quality and future of baklava making. He's critical of the many mass-producing baklava makers in the city who use machines instead of humans.
"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's talking about modernization and climate change, both of which are affecting the quality of the key raw ingredients.
With modern techniques, farmers have figured out how to harvest the pistachios every year instead of the traditional 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 wants to keep the company's growth in check, resisting calls to open a second branch. He says he's committed to maintaining Gaziantep's original method of making baklava, which he sees as perfect.
"If you have even the slightest change in ingredient quality, it won't be Antep baklava anymore," Kocak says.
Where Syrian and Turkish traditions meet: Mahrouseh
The final stop on this baklava crawl is to a shop called Mahrouseh, run by a Syrian refugee family from Aleppo, who had a sweets shop back home, and had to flee to Turkey when the Syrian civil war broke out.
Turkey is hosting the largest number of Syrian refugees in the world, some 3 million according to the United Nations. Many of them have settled in Gaziantep, just 60 miles from Aleppo.
One noticeable difference at this store, professor Mustafa Bayram points out, is there are many kinds of desserts being sold here, from cakes, cookies, baklava and various other 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 a laugh, as he serves customers. "We like to offer our customers a variety they can choose from."
Some of the differences are obvious. The shop's baklava looks drier and more structured than the other Antep counterpart. The texture is crunchy and chewy and the taste is less sweet.
But there is at least one similarity. "They are using Turkish pistachios instead of Syrian ones," Bayram says, pointing out the color. Indeed, the pistachios are Gaziantep's trademark bright green.
"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 knows what kinds of new and delicious recipes will be discovered then.
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