What to eat in Kazakhstan, and where

Those expectations are wrong for two reasons. The first is that the nomadic dishes themselves are better than their descriptions, and are almost always served in a social setting that is half the point. The second is that Kazakhstan is not only Kazakh. The south carries centuries of Uzbek and Uyghur cooking, Almaty has one of the best Korean food scenes outside Korea, and the city’s modern restaurants are doing serious work with local ingredients at prices that would be a bargain in any European capital.

Here is what to order, in the order you are likely to meet it.

The Kazakh table

Beshbarmak

The national dish, and the one that carries the culture.

Boiled meat, usually lamb or horse or both, laid over wide sheets of flat noodle, with onions softened in the cooking broth poured over the top. It arrives on one large platter for the table and is eaten communally, traditionally with the hands: the name means “five fingers”. A bowl of the broth, sorpa, comes alongside or afterwards.

At a family table there is protocol. Cuts are distributed by seniority, and a guest of honour may be offered the sheep’s head. If that happens, it is a compliment. You are not expected to eat all of it.

Beshbarmak is not restaurant food at its best. If you eat it in a hotel it will be adequate. If you eat it in a village house at Saty, or at a festival table in the south, it is a different dish. We build guesthouse dinners deliberately for this reason.

Kazy

Horse sausage, and the single item most visitors decide in advance not to try.

Try it. Kazy is made from rib meat and fat cured in the intestine, sliced thin and served cold as part of a spread, or cut into beshbarmak. It is rich, mildly gamey, closer to a good cured sausage than to anything alarming, and it is one of the genuinely distinctive foods of the region. Shuzhyk is the related smoked version.

Horse meat is ordinary food here and is not a novelty item put on for visitors. It is expensive relative to beef and is what appears at a table set for guests.

Baursak

Small pieces of dough deep fried until puffed and golden, piled in a bowl. They arrive with tea, with beshbarmak, at breakfast, and at every celebration. Slightly sweet, faintly chewy, and impossible to stop eating.

The dairy

This is where Kazakh food is most itself and most unfamiliar.

Kurt are hard white balls of dried salted cheese, sold in every bazaar and eaten as a snack on the road. Intensely salty and sour. Most visitors dislike the first one and some go back for a second.

Irimshik is a dried curd, sometimes sweet, sometimes not.

Kaymak, thick clotted cream, appears at breakfast with bread and jam and is superb.

Shubat is fermented camel milk. Thick, sour, slightly effervescent, with a distinct animal note. It is drunk widely in the west and south and is credited with medicinal properties.

Kumis is fermented mare’s milk, mildly alcoholic, sharply sour, thin and fizzy. Here is the honest description: it tastes like a very sour, very live yoghurt drink with a metallic edge, and served warm on a hot day it is a lot. It is also the drink at the centre of the culture, offered with genuine hospitality, and refusing it entirely is a shame.

Our advice is straightforward. Try both, once, early in the trip, in small quantity, and preferably cold. If you like them, drink them. If you do not, say so pleasantly and nobody minds. Do not accept a large bowl of kumis at eleven in the morning in a yurt on your first day and drink it out of politeness, which is a decision people regret at about two in the afternoon.

The southern table, and the Silk Road layer

South of Almaty and through Shymkent and Turkistan, the cooking is essentially the shared kitchen of Central Asia, and it is the food most visitors end up eating most often.

Plov, called palau or osh locally, is rice cooked with lamb, carrot and cumin in a large cast iron kazan. Kazakh versions are lighter than the Uzbek ones and the two traditions sit side by side in Almaty. If you are going on to Uzbekistan, you will meet a great deal more of it.

Laghman is the Uyghur contribution and it is the best cheap meal in the country: hand-pulled noodles, stretched and slapped against the counter, with a stir-fried sauce of lamb, peppers, tomato and celery. Ask for it guiru, with the sauce on top, or as a soup. Four to seven dollars.

Samsa are pastries of lamb and onion baked stuck to the wall of a tandyr oven, which gives a blistered crust that an oven tray never does. One to two dollars each and the correct thing to eat at eleven in the morning at a bazaar.

Manti are large steamed dumplings of lamb and onion, sometimes pumpkin, eaten with sour cream and black pepper.

The Korean kitchen of Almaty

This is the part of Kazakh eating almost nobody sees coming.

In 1937 the Soviet authorities deported the Korean population of the Russian Far East to Central Asia, and the Koryo-saram community has been in Kazakhstan ever since. Their cooking evolved separately from both South and North Korean food for the best part of a century and became part of the local diet.

What to look for:

• Morkovcha, the Korean carrot salad: julienned carrot with garlic, coriander seed and hot oil. It is sold in every bazaar in the country and is now simply a Kazakh food.
• Kuksi, a chilled noodle soup with cucumber, egg and beef, which in July is exactly right.
• Funchoza, a cold glass noodle salad.
• The Korean pickle counters at the Green Bazaar, where a row of women sell twenty kinds of preserved vegetable by weight.

The Green Bazaar

If you eat in one place in Kazakhstan, eat here.

The Zelyony Bazaar in central Almaty is a covered market with a mezzanine, and it is the clearest single explanation of the country’s food that exists. Downstairs: horse meat butchers with kazy hanging in loops, dried fruit and nuts from the south, mountains of kurt, cheese, honey from the foothills, and the Korean pickle rows. Upstairs and around the edges: counters selling laghman, samsa, plov and manti to people on their lunch break.

Go in the morning. Buy dried apricots and walnuts from a stall that lets you taste first, which is all of them. Have a bowl of laghman standing up. Assemble a lunch for six to ten dollars. The bazaar visit is built into our food and culture route and into three days in Almaty.

The modern Almaty restaurants

The surprise of the trip for a lot of visitors.

Almaty has a serious contemporary restaurant scene working with steppe meat, wild herbs from the Tian Shan, foraged ingredients, horse and lamb treated properly, and fish from the Caspian and the Ili river. There is good natural wine, there are specialty coffee roasters on residential streets, and a tasting menu at the top of the market runs sixty to a hundred and ten dollars, which is a fraction of the equivalent anywhere in Western Europe.

Our one instruction: do not eat in your hotel in Almaty. Plan your evenings and book them. Almaty is not a city where the good places are obvious from the street.

What things cost

A realistic daily food budget for someone eating well and eating widely is $25 to $45. That sits inside our comfortable planning tier of $200 per person per day, land only, and the full breakdown is in what a trip to Kazakhstan costs.

One more thing: apples

Almaty means something close to “father of apples”, and the wild ancestor of every domestic apple on earth, Malus sieversii, grows in the mountains directly above the city. In September the foothill orchards are being picked and the bazaar is full of aport apples, the huge local variety. It is a small thing and it is also, genuinely, where your apple comes from.

Related

• Kazakhstan: the complete guide to planning your trip
• Almaty in three days
• Steppe, city and table: 11 days
• Kazakhstan for the first time
• All our Kazakhstan trips

Frequently asked questions