I had a quintessential Central Asian experience Thursday evening, courtesy of my friend Oybek. He took a group of us to a Kazakh restaurant to celebrate the start of the long weekend.
Beshbarmak is the national dish of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan and is a traditional meal of the Central Asian nomadic steppe tribes. It is called “five fingers” because it was traditionally eaten without utensils. The dish is a combination of beef, horse and/or lamb meat wrapped in flat pasta noodles in a broth. I recently read a Genghis Khan biography and this was a meal of the Mongol armies. They were reliant on their animals while traveling and their diet was rich in meat and dairy products. Both the meat and dough are boiled. It is a heavy meal but delicious. The Kazakh nomadic tribes were probably similar to the Mongols. You can see Mongolian DNA in Kazakhs with their Asian eyes which differ from the Uzbek eyes, which are rounder and more Turkic.
To make the experience even better, the restaurant (Shilpildoq) was in a village about an hour out of Tashkent halfway between the villages of Parkent and Chirchiq. We also were served the traditional shorpo (mutton broth) and kumis, fermented mare’s milk. We reserved one of the yurts. It was a cold night and the wood stove made it cozy inside.
I was really curious about the fermented horse milk. It tasted better than I expected, slightly sour, and carbonated, but not an overwhelmingly bad taste as I was expecting. It is served cold and has an alcohol content of about 2% so it would take you quite a few drinks to become intoxicated. One of the guys Rashid said that it was a different kind of buzz, instead of vodka that goes to your head, getting drunk on kumis is more of a body buzz with a clear mind. I had two cups so I didn’t feel anything. Horse’s milk is high in lactose, closer to human milk than a cow’s. I remember drinking a bottle of Nadia’s milk when she was nursing and it was surprisingly sweet. The sugar is a good medium for fermentation to occur. I would drink it again, especially in the summer.
I was quite gassy Thursday night as my body is not used to so much meat. The pasta in broth was tasty and the meat was OK. Horse sausage was served with the meal and it was salty. It was a special evening for me. I love the friendship and camaraderie and felt honored that Oybek shared his ancestral culture with us.
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