My name is Taner Kayaci, and I grew up tasting history.

I was born and raised in Bulancak, a small coastal town on the eastern Black Sea shore of Giresun province. Life there moved to the rhythm of hazelnut harvests, anchovy boats returning at dawn, and the wood-smoke that drifted through the lanes every morning from my grandmother's kitchen. Before I could read, I could already identify twenty kinds of wild herbs she gathered from the hillside above our house.

Every dish I learned was a lesson passed mouth-to-ear, hand-to-hand. My grandmother Fatma never wrote a single recipe down — she measured flour in the crook of her palm and tasted soup by the sound of its simmer. My aunts, the women of our mahalle, and the older men who still baked ekmek in communal stone ovens: they were my first teachers, and their knowledge reached back centuries.

Anatolian food culture is one of the most intricate and layered culinary traditions in the world — and it is disappearing faster than most people realize. Regional dishes that once defined an entire valley are forgotten when a generation does not pass them on. Preparation techniques rooted in Ottoman, Byzantine, and pre-Christian Anatolian practices are vanishing with the elders who carry them.

tanerkayaci was born from a sense of urgency and a deep love for what I do not want to lose. Through this platform, I travel across Turkey — from the hazelnut groves of the Black Sea to the spice bazaars of Gaziantep, from the yogurt-makers of Erzurum to the olive-oil kitchens of the Aegean — recording, writing, cooking, and sharing recipes before they exist only in memory.

These are not restaurant recipes dressed up for Instagram. They are living documents: the actual food of real people, prepared the way it has always been prepared. My hope is that when you cook from these pages, you do not just feed your family — you keep a thread of history alive.