Gourmet Gaziantep

After Nemrut Dagi, we got on a bus (okay, three mini busses and a city bus, over the course of 7 hours) and headed for Gaziantep in southeastern Turkey.  Gaziantep's claims to fame are both food-related: it is the foodie capital of Turkey and the pistachio & baklava capital of Turkey (and thus, some would claim, the world).  As it turns out, it is a really cool city of about a million people that is also, full stop, the nuttiest place I have ever been in my life.  No word of a lie, at one point a pistachio actually flew out of nowhere and hit Chad in the chest.

[Note from Chad: pistachios, baklava and incredible food everywhere.  Best city ever!  Except for Sarah.]

Our trip there in pictures:

Happy to be on mini bus 2 of 3.  We were only a little less happy after it took 3 hours on a minibus without air conditioning to travel 160 km over hot, rocky plains.

This guy helped us find the city bus downtown from the bus station.  I thought he was just being nice showing us a bunch of pictures of himself at his military base in Batman (a real city in Turkey), but Chad advises that I could have replaced him with a Turkish version had I so desired.  [Note from Chad: Sarah didn't seem to understand that sitting next to this young & forward stranger on the bus, instead of her husband, might cause him to get the wrong idea.]

Chad's lunch time lahmacun, an arabic-style pizza topped with lamb, onion, and tomato.

[Note from Chad: huge lahmacun served with parsely, lemon and peppers, plus two pops, came to about $3.50 CDN.  Not only is the food in this town amazing, it's the cheapest we've found so far.]

Gaziantep has a copper quarter - this guy was tapping out a design free hand along with many others.

The lovely kale (castle) standing over the town.  We got some culture and went to see the museum here, which provides the Turkish perspective on the war(s) and events of the early 1920s, as modern Turkey was being born

One of these statues is not like the others...

Some new friends we made at the culinary museum - they were thrilled that it was the last day of school.  The kid in the middle spoke decent english and helped us find a baklavaci we were looking for.

Chad's baklava experience can be detailed by the photos below.  In his words, the baklava was worth coming from Istanbul for.  And that's a 15 hour overnight bus ride, people.

Oldest baklava maker in the world, found at the bazaar in Gaziantep

This baklavaci is a chain, but apparently its best pastries come from this, the location of the original shop

And now for the "unboxing" photos.  Chad kept it to an amount he could eat in one evening, out of deference to Sarah's nut allergies.  Left to his own devices, he probably would have purchased the shop itself.

[Note from Chad: I'm not often given to wild hyperbole, so please believe me when I say this was by far, FAR, FAR and away the best baklava I've ever tasted.  All the ingredients are local to the Gaziantep region, and are chosen very carefully to make the best product.  It's like a completely different foodstuff from the bland, old, uninteresting version I tasted in Istanbul, which at the time (not knowing any better) seemed not bad.  In fact - I can't believe I'm saying it - this might be the best dessert I've ever had.  Hopefully my judgement wasn't been affected by my normally-nut-deprived state of mind.]

Baklava is sold by shape - different shapes have different contents.

• The stuff on the left seems to be a mixture of pistachios with some oil and honey.  Tasty, but not something to knock your socks off.  Essentially just ground pistachios.
• The stuff on he right is classic baklava.  Thin, crisp layers of phyllo pastry that taste like a buttery French croissant, on top of crumbled pistachios, all of it cooked in and saturated with oil and honey.  The pastry retains significant crispiness, while the underlying nut layer is slightly chewy and caramelized.  It was like angel tears in my mouth, no kidding.
• Unbelievably, the middle type was even better.  Similar to classic baklava, but containing walnuts as well, and a bit of rich cream filling, and somehow even more oil and honey.  It was like eating a massively rich, pastry-based flavour grenade.  I feel happy just remembering how it tasted.

]

We then went out for dinner on the town, followed by a walk home through Gaziantep's lovely and large city park.

Appetizer of bulgar (wheat) and spices with mint leaves

Local dish: antep kebap.  Hollowed, sun-dried eggplant stuffed with rice and cooked with spices.  Included a bonus of two sun-dried red peppers with a spicier rice filling, plus fresh lemon, mint and yogurt.  Incredible - and about $6 CDN at a full-service restaurant with uniformed waiters.

We only had an afternoon in Gaziantep, but it was one of the highlights of our trip.  We didn't see a single other foreign tourist, the food was amazing (what I could eat of it, anyway!), and there was lots to see and do to keep us busy.  As far as I could tell, the only downside was that the streets were lined with shops just like this...

Nut central

[Note from Chad: Gaziantep was great just for the food.  By the time I had one meal & ogled all the ingredients and dishes and the little culinary museum, I was sold.  It is definitely more off-the-beaten-track than western Turkey: very little English is spoken, there are few-to-no western European tourists, and people are perhaps a bit more conservative, though it's a modern and bustling city.  In fact, I was dressed in normal tourist fashion with a golf shirt and knee-length shorts - fairly respectable.  Then one of the high school kids we met asked in jest if I was a footballer.  What?  Oh - the shorts.  Then I realized not a single person in the city was wearing anything leg-baring.  Time for jeans despite the heat.

I wouldn't recommend making this your first stop in Turkey, since it's easier to get an introduction in the more touristed regions in the west.  But if you've travelled the western side a bit, it's definitely worth it to take a cheap internal flight (and they are CHEAP in Turkey) to Gaziantep, and eat unbelievable local food fit for kings at a fraction of the cost of meals in the usual tourist areas.]