Uzbekistan Today

Uzbek National Cuisine

It is said that in order to get to know a person better, 36 pounds of salt should be eaten with him. So, in order to know better the customs and culture of a nation, its national dishes should be tasted.

The Uzbek national cuisine has a centuries-old history and reflects the diversity of the customs and traditions of the people. The development of the cuisine benefited much from the new crops which had come from the countries of the Great Silk Road. Moreover, the local rulers used to bring the best culinary experts from the conquered lands.

In every Uzbek house a guest is always offered a piala (a small bowl) of aromatic green tea. According to the original Uzbek tea ceremony the tea from the teapot that has just been filled with boiling water to brew is to be poured into the piala and returned to the teapot three times. Only in this way all the aroma and flavor of the tea is believed to emerge. As a token of respect for the guest the host fills only one-half of the piala, and then, putting the right hand to his heart, with his left hand holds out this piala to the guest. At the same time the fresh flat round Uzbek bread is served. This bread is still made in accordance with the ancestral recipe in the clay oven tandyr.

The traditional feast at the Uzbek home starts with sweets. Offered to go with the tea, they are the crystallized sugar navat; the candy parvarda, which is made from flour and sugar; sweet tiny cakes; the halva halvoiytar (halva is a hard paste of nuts, sugar and oil).

Along with the titbits the guests are treated to the rich mutton soup shurpa, which is spiced with plenty of fennel and parsley.

One of the favorite dishes in Uzbekistan is lagman. Its recipe was brought by Uigur culinary experts from the Chinese province Xinjiang. This dish, combining in itself the first and the second course, contains long handmade noodles dressed with sauce with pieces of meat and vegetables.

Yet the main dish of the Uzbek cuisine is pilav. Pilav is an indispensable part of any festive meal: none of the weddings or any other important occasions, on which guests are ever received, can do without it.

As the legend says, the way of cooking pilav was "invented" during the conquest of Sogdiana by Alexander the Great. Supposedly, during a long mission trip his army ran out of food, except one sack of rice and a wild sheep that they had managed to kill. The cook made a dish from this stuff, spicing it with the seeds of some steppe herbs, and the amount of that "first pilav" turned out to be sufficient to feed the whole army.

The respect of the Uzbeks for pilav can be traced in their language: the Uzbek for 'pilav' is 'osh', which literally means 'food'.

In the past pilav was a feast of the poor and everyday meal of the rich. According to historical sources, the emir of Bukhara used to eat pilav three times a day and arranged a sort of cooking contest for the best pilav among his dignitaries.

There is a wide variety of cooking ways of pilov. Depending on the region of Uzbekistan, it is cooked either in fat of sheep's tail or in vegetable oil; besides meat, rice and onions, which are the basic ingredients, the following is often added: red or yellow carrots, seeds of thyme, ground chilly, white raisins or pomegranate seeds, dried barberries, marrowfat peas, pieces of quince, heads of garlic. As a rule, pilav is served with green radish chopped into thin sticks, or with the salad achik-chuchuk which is made from finely cut tomatoes, onions and chilly.

Uzbek cuisine can't be considered as such without the flaky pasty somsa, which has minced meat and a piece of fat of sheep's tail inside; or the original ravioli-like Uzbek manty, which are filled with meat, potatoes or sweet pumpkin, and cooked in steam.

Traditionally any Uzbek feast treatment finishes with the mutton or beef kebab shashlik. Gourmets especially value jigar-kebab made of sheep's liver.

At any time of the year there is always an addition of fresh fruit on the table, for Uzbekistan is so rich in apples, pears, peaches, grapes, persimmons, melons and water-melons.

Each dish should be served in a special kind of china or earthenware. Pilav is served on the large flat plate lyagan, whereas for shurpa and lagman the deep bowl kosa is used, tea is especially good in the small drinking bowl piala.

We have told here only about the most common dishes of the Uzbek national cuisine, while there are about 200 of them. Each region of the country has its own favorite dish: the small sausages of minced meat and rice hasip of Fergana Valley; shurpa with the small ravioli-like chuchvara of Khorezm. On visiting Samarkand one can't help tasting boiled marrowfat peas and mutton served on the special flat round bread patyr.

Nowadays, when fast-food restaurants are omnipresent and so many people eat burgers and hotdogs in a hurry, the Uzbek tradition of enjoying delicious food and unhurried conversation at a friendly table deserves special respect and recognition.

Uzbek Plov

Plov is the king of Uzbek cuisine. Plov is served during a wedding feast and to celebrate the arrival of honorable guest, at the crowded jubilee celebrations and in the family circle. Neither a friendly dinner nor funeral repast can do without plov. Dishes made of rice are known almost in every country of the East, but the Uzbek plov, recipe of which was created in the ancient times, can be called the masterpiece of culinary art. There are a lot of folk parables and legends about healing and nourishing qualities of plov.
Uzbek people believe that the very name for plov - "osh-polov" conceals the first letters of the names of the dish basic ingredients: onion, carrot, meat, oil, salt, water and rice.Plov has always been the favorite dish in Uzbekistan. A few centuries ago plov was cooked in rich families almost every day; well-to-do people ate it once a week, every Friday's eve. For the poor people plov was an infrequent dish which was served only during big holidays. In Uzbek family, as is the case with many countries, food is cooked by woman, but it is man who is reputed to possess the skills of making real festive plov.
There are more than fifty varieties of plov in Uzbek cuisine : with meat or chicken, peas or potato; cooked in the steam or in sheep fat; Khorezmian or Samarkand variant, with quince or garlic. The ancient recipes of plov with quails and raisins, or plov made of rice of waxy ripeness have been preserved unchanged since the 10th -12th centuries, whereas some techniques of making "classical plov" are thousand-year old.

The process of cooking festive plov looks like a sacred action. To make a good plov it is necessary first of all to use cast iron bowl with round bottom and a set of sharp knives for peeling, cutting and chopping the dish ingredients (meat and vegetables), as well as special metal skimmers - kaftgirs .

Usually a team of cook's mates peel and chop onion, shred carrot. The best sort of carrot for plov should be of light-yellow colour, not the usual orange-red one. Rice is to be washed thoroughly and sometimes it is steeped in water. In the well heated bowl (till white smoke appears) sheep fat or vegetable oil is heated up, and then the process of preparing zirvak , the basis of plov, starts. After onion is fried in the boiling oil, the pieces of meat should be added. Depending on the recipe, mutton, goat's meat, beef or even horse's meat in the form of special sausage kazi is used for making plov. Meat is fried till tender reddish crust appears. After that carrot should be added, which is then slightly fried. The next step in making plov is to pour water into the bowl and stew it on small fire. The prepared zirvak, seasoned with salt, ground paprika or capsicum, cumin seeds and dried barberry, should be transparent and present the whole taste bouquet of fried mixture of onion, meat and carrot.

And then comes the crucial moment of plov cooking process - rice adding. It should be mentioned that rice as the basic product of irrigated agriculture was cultivated in Central Asia since the ancient times. Famous American researcher of Great Silk Road Rafael Pampelly, who discovered near the capital of Turkmenistan, Ashgabat, ancient culture of Anau dating back to the 4th - 3rd millennium B.C., found fragments of ancient table wear ornamented with grains of wheat, rice and barley. As it was estimated by archeologists, rice was successfully cultivated in the Fergana valley, in the lower reaches of the Zeravshan, Amu Darya and Sir darya rivers. In his work "Geography" the ancient Greek historian and geographer Strabon indicated that 'Saka and Massagete tribes inhabiting lands to the east of the Caspian Sea sow pearly grain'.

The best variety of rice for plov is devzira - a local sort created by folk selection over many centuries. It is known from historical chronicles that in the 10th -11th centuries in the epoch of the Samanids plov made of devzira sort of rice was served at the court feasts.

This variety of rice is cultivated in the Fergana valley mainly on farmers' individual plots of land because it is considered to be of low yield capacity and is not good to be grown on big areas. But devzira rice low yield capacity is compensated by excellent quality of plov. The oblong ribbed grains of pinkish color have high water absorbing property, contain less starch, but exceed other rice varieties in vitamin B2 and choline content. Dry rice devzira crunches in the handful, powdering palms with tender pink pollen.

Another local variety of rice appropriate for making plov is bugdaygurunch . Its big white grains with nacreous shade should be steeped in warm salty water for one-two hours before being cooked.

A layer of rice is placed on top of the meat and carrot, flattened and then covered with water. The right quantity of water is defined in a simple way: water should cover the rice at the height of the first joint of the cook's forefinger. When the water in the bowl evaporates, with special wooden stick the cook punctures the rice mass in some spots and adds water into these apertures.

Plov is considered to be good if rice is crumbly and its grains are soft but don't stick to one another. To bring plov to readiness the rice in the bowl is gathered in the center in a form of a hill and then covered with a special ceramic lid - damtavok , or with a big deep plate, and the fire is put to minimum. The experienced cook identifies readiness of plov by slightly striking the wall of the bowl with the skimmer. If the moisture has not evaporated completely, some hissing can be heard, if the dish is ready the bowl gives a clunk. Plov is served to the table on big ceramic or faience dishes. Rice is put in the form of attractive hill, and pieces of meat are put on top of it. All this is sprinkled with finely cut green. In the ancient times during a wedding feast plov was served to every guest individually on flat bread -lepeshka.

The recipe of Uzbek plov was handed over not only from generation to generation, but from merchant to merchant, from traveler to traveler on the Great Silk Road. While undergoing some modification due to local tastes and available ingredients it has become a popular dish among all eastern peoples from Xinjiang (China) to Azerbaijan.

From time immemorial plov was considered to be healthy food. Indeed, plov is highly nourishing, easily digested food with balanced ratio of carbohydrates, fats and protein and can be successfully used in treatment of anemia, tuberculosis and general exhaustion.

Following centuries-old traditions, in Uzbekistan plov is served mainly in the evening, for dinner. The indispensable additions to the plov are salads with fresh or pickled vegetables, fruit and berries: tomatoes, cucumbers, black radish, red radish and onion, pomegranate grains, sour grape, cherry, strawberry supplemented with greens, coriander, parsley and dill, garlic, and basil leaves. Such salads not only enrich plov with vitamins but also provide better digestion of this rather fat dish.

And of course there should be tea on the table. Black tea is a preferred variety of tea in Tashkent, whereas in other provinces of Uzbekistan people usually drink green tea ( kok choi ). The specific tea-making ritual is strictly observed in every Uzbek family. First the hostess would swill the porcelain teapot with boiling water, with a special spoon she would then put in it some dry tea, and at last she would throw some boiling water over the tea pot. In a few minutes teapot and small porcelain tea cups ( pialas ) are served on the table. Before starting to offer tea to the guest it should be poured into teacup three times, each time being poured back into the tea pot; they say it helps to reveal the taste and aroma of the beverage. A respected guest would be served with the tea poured in the teacup at one third of its volume. This amount of tea in the cup is enough only for a few gulps, but thus the guest would avoid burning his fingers while holding the cup without the handle. With tea the hostess would offer crystallized sugar - navat , some honey and sweets. If pancakes are the most characteristic dish of Russian cuisine, galushkas are typical for Ukrainian cuisine, and onion soup is considered to be the traditional soup of the French, the national character of the Uzbek people can be best perceived through tasting Uzbek plov.