Got Yogurt?

In the Central Asian steppes, that vast prairie stretching from China to the Ukraine, the nomads live mostly on dairy products. And they try to squeeze as much variety out of milk as they can. They make butter and buttermilk and cream and whey and cottage cheese.

And yogurt, of course. It’s no accident that we got the word “yogurt” from the Turkish languages. They also thicken yogurt to make “yogurt cheese” (suzma) and they curdle it by boiling to make a thicker sort of cheese (bishlaq). They dry yogurt into hard balls called qurut, which they say settles the stomach. In Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, people peddle qurut at the entrances to the subways as a cure for motion sickness.

The Kazakhs throw yogurt into boiling milk until it curdles, then remove the curdled part and mix it with butter for a treat called ezhegei. Or they boil sheep’s milk and cow’s milk yogurt until it curdles and mix the curd with butter in the same way, making akalak.

To preserve cheese, the nomads dry it rock-hard. This dried cheese (irimchik) can be used in cooking once you grind it in a mortar. For unexpected dropper-inners, the Kazakhs often mix ground irimichik with butter. (Between one thing and another, the nomads eat a lot of butter--the average Mongol consumes a pound a day.) The Mongols also like to roll cheese into strings which they call horhoi aaruul or cheese worms.

The nomads even ferment milk, making kumiss, a sort of mild wine which has caught on with many non-nomads in neighboring countries. The Mongols distill a kind of brandy out of kumiss (which has not caught on nearly so well; it’s been compared to vodka that smells like wet diapers).

Talk about resourcefulness. By comparison, using every part of the buffalo, as the Plains Indians are said to have done, looks simple.