Where the Best Baklava Begins

Undoubtedly, Anatolian cooks were playing around with dough, butter and beet-sugar long before the Ottoman Empire. The Romans in Constantinople and the Greeks in Byzantion loved their sweet pastries. But the ingredient that was added by the chefs in the Topkapı Palace in the fifteenth century was showmanship. They wanted their audience (the sultan, his family, his advisers and occasionally his bodyguards) to exclaim, ‘My god, how can he roll out his filo so thin?’ and ‘My god, how does he have the patience to create forty layers, and still get it so light?’ Nowadays, those questions are asked every day by the customers at İmam Çağdaş, the best baklava maker in Gaziantep, which is the best baklava town in Turkey.