The Man Behind
the Recipes

I grew up in the Çankaya district of Ankara, in a apartment that always smelled of something slow-cooking. My grandmother, whom we called Büyükannem, spoke little about her past. She had migrated from a small village in the Kayseri highlands in the 1950s and carried her recipes the way she carried her memories — silently, precisely, and entirely in her hands. She never wrote a thing down. I learned to cook by watching.

For most of my twenties I worked in Ankara's publishing industry, editing travel and food magazines. It was satisfying work, but I felt a creeping anxiety: the cooks I was writing about were ageing. The women who remembered how to cold-ferment yogurt the old way, the village bakers who still used wood-fire tandir ovens, the herb-gatherers in the Taurus mountains — they had no successors. Their knowledge was evaporating quietly, one generation at a time, without anyone raising the alarm.

In 2014 I took a leave of absence and drove east. Over the following three years I travelled through Central Anatolia, the Black Sea coast, the Kurdish southeast, and the Aegean hinterlands, staying in family homes, guest houses, and occasionally a spare room in a tea house. I was not a tourist. I came with a notebook, a small voice recorder, and — most importantly — a willingness to sit quietly in someone else's kitchen for days before they trusted me enough to show me how they actually cooked.

I documented over four hundred recipes on those journeys. But the recipes themselves were almost secondary. What I was really collecting were the oral annotations — the why and the when. Why does a Gaziantep cook toast her spices in tallow, not olive oil? When exactly does a Black Sea grandmother add her anchovies to the pilaf, and what does she listen for in the sizzle? These details rarely survive translation into a standard recipe card, but they are precisely what makes the difference between a dish that tastes correct and one that tastes true.

abdulaziz-turkoglu began as a private archive — a way for me to organise my notes before they yellowed beyond reading. My wife, Selin, convinced me that other people might care. She was right, though I underestimated by how much. Within six months of publishing my first twelve recipes, I was receiving emails from Turkish diaspora communities in Germany, the Netherlands, and Australia — people who recognised flavours from their own childhoods and wanted to understand them more deeply.

That recognition shaped everything about how I write here. My readers are not always beginners. Many of them grew up eating these dishes but never learned to make them. Some are professional cooks curious about technique. Others are food scholars or journalists. I try to write for all of them simultaneously — keeping the prose accessible without being patronising, and keeping the food science honest without being dry.

My philosophy, if I can call it that, is one of faithful adaptation. I believe strongly in preserving the integrity of a traditional recipe — its essential ratios, its defining flavours, its cultural context. But I am not a fundamentalist. I will tell you when a modern oven does something better than an open hearth, and I will suggest a reasonable substitute if one of the original ingredients is genuinely impossible to source outside Anatolia. What I will not do is flatten a recipe into something unrecognisable in the name of convenience.

Büyükannem died in 2019. I was fortunate to have spent a long weekend with her the previous autumn, cooking through her full Eid menu together — something we had not done since I was a child. I filmed everything on my phone, a little clumsily, while keeping notes in the other hand. Several of those recipes now live on this blog. Publishing them felt like a responsibility and, I admit, something very close to grief given a useful shape.

This is why I keep writing. Not because I think I am the definitive authority on Anatolian cooking — I am not, and I never will be. But because these flavours deserve a careful witness, and I happen to be one who can write.