Bread is considered one of the main, if not the main, dishes in the cuisine of many countries. There is a particularly reverent attitude towards bread and flour products in the countries of Central Asia. Not a single meal in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan is complete without flatbreads prepared in different ways. A common feature of Central Asian flatbreads is that they are baked in conical clay ovens - tandoors. But each nation has its own recipes for making bread dough.
The most significant assortment of flatbreads in Uzbekistan. Uzbeks have a great variety of bread recipes. These can be ordinary flatbreads made from white flour with yeast and milk, the same flatbreads, but sweet, flatbreads made from corn flour or bran, flatbreads baked in a tandoor, fried in a dry frying pan or in vegetable oil.
The dough is kneaded with kefir, regular yeast or “khamir moya” leaven based on a fermented piece of dough from a previous batch of flatbreads. “Shirmoi non” flatbreads are especially difficult to prepare: in addition to flour, they also use chickpeas soaked in water, bran and anise tincture (they are used to prepare a starter that replaces yeast), and the process of preparing the dough itself takes almost a day.
Uzbek round flatbreads come in various sizes, but almost always have a patterned crispy center and fluffy soft edges. Each region of the republic has its own recipe for baking flatbreads; residents of Uzbekistan can easily distinguish Fergana, Samarkand, and Khiva flatbreads. Kokand Patyr has a uniform thickness and a pattern of tiny holes over the entire surface; thanks to a special recipe for making the dough, it can not spoil for a long time.
Interesting fact: most of the large bakeries in Uzbekistan employ men - they knead the dough, shape the flatbreads and bake them. But in an ordinary home, baking bread is a woman’s responsibility.
As in Uzbekistan, in Tajikistan there are many recipes for flatbreads: chapoti (flat and thin like lavash, from the Khatlon region), sweet kulcha, Rasht girdachi - the largest of all, fatir buttery flatbread with onions, fried puff pastries Kalama, ordinary unleavened flatbreads, flatbreads with herbs. They are also baked either in a tandoor or fried in a cauldron in oil. Recipes for flatbreads include flour, water, salt and leaven like the Uzbek “khamir moya” or yeast, as well as milk and butter.
There are also many recipes for flatbreads in Kazakhstan - shelpek, tokash, taba nan. The Kazakhs have a widespread method of preparing flatbreads in a cauldron in hot oil (for example, shelpek), but there are also recipes for the tandoor (taba nan and tokash, flatbreads made from sourdough and water dough with small cuts along the surface). Flatbreads called kazanjappai are baked in a hot and oiled cauldron.
Shelpek flatbread can be sweet or unleavened; the dough for it is prepared with kefir, yeast or sourdough. Shelpek has a puff version called kattama.
A frequent dish on the Kazakh table is baursaks. These are rich round donuts made from milk or kefir dough, fried in a large amount of oil.
Types of Kyrgyz flatbreads vary depending on the region. They can also be rich (katamma, churek nan, shirin tokoch, Frunzenskie, amateur, Chuya) or ordinary, unleavened (Kashgar, gulcha, tandyr nan, Kyrgyz komoch). Externally, Kyrgyz flatbreads resemble bread products of other Central Asian peoples - round, with a pattern of small holes in the middle and fluffy sides.
To make Kyrgyz flatbreads, an original leaven made with meat broth and milk, “Kamyr Achatki”, is used. Flatbreads are baked from the resulting mixture, and the rest of the dough is used for the next batch.
In Kyrgyzstan, flatbreads are baked on a hot stove, in a cauldron with oil, or in a tandoor.
Turkmenistan also has dozens of recipes for making flatbread, many of which are similar to recipes from neighboring peoples. In addition to the traditional chorek baked in a tandoor, the Turkmen culinary tradition includes such varieties of flatbread as yagly-chorek puffed with butter, etli-chorek with meat, gatlama - puff flatbread fried in oil and sprinkled with sugar, gatlakly and celpek, which are also fried in a cauldron, chapadas - thin flatbreads from the tandoor.
The dough is kneaded with “hamyrmaya” sourdough, with yeast or kefir, with white flour or flour with bran, with or without milk and butter. All these types of flatbreads are prepared both for regular meals and for special occasions.
In Turkmenistan, and in other Central Asian republics, they often prefer bread baked according to traditional national recipes. These are not only purely taste preferences, but also a tribute to the customs of our ancestors, who revered bread as a shrine.
Some interesting Central Asian traditions related to bread:
- at the beginning of the meal, it is customary to break the flatbread with your hands, but not to cut it with a knife;
- put the flatbread with the pattern down - show disrespect for the bread;
- during an engagement there is a ritual of breaking a cake;
- an oath on bread is considered one of the most powerful;
- an even number of flatbreads is served to the guests. An odd number is distributed at funerals;
- they tried to mechanize the process of forming flatbreads at bakeries, but to no avail - flatbreads are still molded by hand even in bakeries.
