Erzincan Tulum Peynir, the sheep's milk cheese from the mountains in northeast Anatolia – after my visits there in July of last year and this April this translates into so many wonderful pictures, so many impressions and thoughts. Animals and people live in an impressive symbiosis in this landscape of mountain plateaus rising high above the Karasu valley, the black river that is called Euphrates further south. 

Erzincan Tulum Peynir: that is the faces of Halesil, Songül, Mustafa Gün and all the others who during the summer move from the mountain villages up to the plateaus, with tents and sheep, to translate that landscape into cheese. It is hard work, but also the incredible light of the morning sun, it is the fresh cheese dripping from the horses‘ saddle bags, the generous breakfast served to visitors. Mustafa Gün, head of the family whose story I’m telling in the current issue of Effilee magazine (please buy and read!), calls it „the factory without smoke“.

How it actually tastes? It is the most concentrated, most dense „cream“ cheese you could possibly imagine, made from exceptionally tasty sheep milk, mineraly and salty, and with an acidity that first seems very quiet and discreet but then, while the cheese slowly melts in your mouth, emerges from all that opulence to add a refreshing finish that might remind you of really good salt pickles.

And now, if hopefully you’re still reading on instead of clicking onto other shores out of frustration, because you rightly assume that this is yet another cheese you won’t find at your corner store or the next supermarket, here is my summer special: I brought one of the Güns‘ Erzincan Tulum with me, FOR YOU.

Send me an email and convince me that a piece of that should make its way to you (within Germany only, please) – and that’s exactly what will happen. To show my gratitude for your attention and company over all those years, and your openness across all conventional borders. Teşekkürler.