I discovered Kirghizstan in November 2019 for a week full of discoveries. We drove across the country with a rented Lada Niva (classic!), along the Toktogul and Issyk-Kul lakes and the boarders with Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, on the road from Bishkek, the capital, to Osh, second biggest town in the country, then all the way to Karakol, up there in the East of the country.
Food there is mostly focused on meat and we witnessed it from the moment we set foot on the Osh Bazaar in Bishkek: as we landed in the early hours of the morning, we went straight to the bazaar as the day was getting started and found ourselves in the middle of the meat district. What a start to the day! I won’t be posting any pictures here, don’t worry about it, but it was quite impressive. The meats that are eaten are mostly mutton, cow and beef and horse meat. No pork or very little as the country is of Muslim religion. There are a lot of dishes made up of broth, meat and pasta.
We tried amongst other things a dish called laghman uzbek, it’s a dish made of mutton meat and vegetables, broth and pasta. Beshbarmak is also quite good, there are fewer vegetables and it is mostly made of meat and pasta. Plov remains a complete mystery… Everywhere we went, we saw it on the menu and ordered it, and everywhere we were told: “Niet plov !”.
And although I refuse to eat horse meat at home, it’s something you virtually can’t do without in Kirghizstan: the animal plays a very important role in the nomadic life and the meat is also widely used in the kitchen. This is how I learnt, once it was too late, that the aforementioned beshbarmak is often made with horse meat. So be it. When in Rome… And I’ll have to be honest, the horse meat sausage called kazi is quite the delicacy! Its texture differs from our cured meat sausages as meat and fat aren’t mixed in tiny pieces but cured together in bigger chunks.
There are also plenty of dumplings which are common to many cuisines of the world, also in the East. In Kirghizstan, there are manti (spicy lamb and mutton dumplings), oromos (big dumplings, either meat based or vegetarian versions with veg and cheese). There are also “pasties” such as samsa, the ones we ate were often made with pumpkin or, once again, you guessed it… beef and mutton!
There are also cheese and fermented drinks, made with mare’s milk or cereals. This reflects once more the nomadic way of life which half of the population still follows, and all of these drinks contain some alcohol. Koumis has a rather nice taste, as we found in the yurt, the only yurt still standing that we found on our way late in season! Boso is a drink made from fermented grains of millet and it also has a rather nice and sweet taste. Maksim, is made from fermented wheat and it is quite another story, but there is something for everyone. As for cheese, how surprising! These very hard, little white balls are little pieces of cheese! It’s called kurut, either smoked or not, and its very strong taste recalls that of Italian ricotta salata.
Tasting koumis in the yurt 
Kurut, kurut everywhere!
The Kirghiz table is another heritage from the nomadic way of life and it is found in yurts and restaurants all around the country – it’s a sort of coffee table on top of a structure and you sit on big, colourful mattresses, cross-legged or squatting. We brought 3 meters of that material home with us and asked an upholsterer to make some mattresses for us so we now have our very own Kirghiz furnishings!
Once we got home, we had a look at our notes and scribbles. I cooked a langman, and it was very good, but not quite as good as the ones we had there!