Making Kyrgyz Food

We’ve been cooking up a storm in Tyup this week!  I want to learn how to make a few Kyrgyz dishes before I go and since recipes are just passed down through families I asked my host mother to teach me how to make a couple of my favorite foods.



One of the main dishes in Kyrgyzstan is Manti, a steamed dumpling normally filled with sheep, although I’ve had them with potato.  I wanted to try making them with squash.

We don’t do a lot of measuring here, they all seem to know intuitively how much of each ingredient they need (in fact we don’t even have anything to measure with, I’ve just been using regular spoons and tea cups).



To make the manti, my host mother made dough with flour, salt, water, and oil, in unknown quantities.  I then cut up the squash, potato and onion into tiny pieces and she added pepper and salt for flavor and to draw the water out.  We made small flat circles from the dough and filled them with the vegetables.  I’m still working on closing the manti, it’s hard!



They have these really cool steamer pots here.  They’re tall and open on the bottom.  They hold several round trays with holes and an opening in the middle for the steam.  They use these trays for dumplings and oromo (kind of a Kyrgyz lasagna).  They pots fit right over a kazan of boiling water.  We cooked the manti for half an hour.





Probably my favorite thing in Kyrgyzstan is laza.  It’s a condiment made from garlic and chili peppers and it’s been especially useful since it covers up the sheep taste that permeates everything in the country.  We crushed several heads of garlic and then added a bunch of dry chili pepper flakes and a little salt and then poured hot oil over the mixture.





My host mother made peroshkees too.  Peroshkees are delicious (and totally unhealthy) and I eat them all the time because they're one of the few Kyrgyz foods that doesn't include sheep.  Plus they're cheap.  Peroshkees are fried dough with potato inside.  I like to eat them with laza.