What to eat in Almaty
Kazakh cooking and the city's mix: beshbarmak, kuyrdak, horse sausage, baursak, laghman and manti from the Green Bazaar, kumys, shubat and milk tea.

[ ] Eat beshbarmak
    Boiled lamb or horse with thin sheets of dough and onion in broth, served on a communal platter. The national dish, eaten by hand and shared.
[ ] Try kazy horse sausage
    A sausage of horse rib meat and fat, boiled or air-dried. Sliced into thin rounds and served cold as a starter, or added to beshbarmak.
[ ] Try kuyrdak
    Fried offal — liver, heart, kidney — with onion and potato in its own fat. The first dish made after a slaughter and the quickest in the cuisine.
[ ] Eat baursak
    Puffy pieces of fried dough, piled up on the table with tea and with meat. Eaten with butter, honey, kaymak cream or simply as bread.
[ ] Try laghman
    Hand-pulled noodles with meat and vegetables, as a soup or stir-fried. An Uyghur legacy, and the best laghman kitchens in Almaty are run by Uyghur and Dungan families.
[ ] Eat manty
    Large steamed dumplings with chopped meat, onion and either pumpkin or tail fat. Eaten by hand and bitten carefully; juice collects inside.
[ ] Get samsa from the tandoor
    A triangular pastry of chopped meat and onion baked against the tandoor wall. Sold by bazaars and along highways, and taken hot from the oven.
[ ] Try sorpa broth
    A strong meat broth with tail fat, drunk from a bowl separately from the dish. It is regarded as restorative and comes at the end of the meal.
[ ] Buy Korean salads at the bazaar
    Spiced carrot, raw fish hoe, fern shoots, soy stalk salads — whole rows of them at the Green Bazaar. A legacy of the Korean diaspora deported here in the 1930s.
[ ] Try kurt
    Dried balls of salted curd, rock hard and very salty. A nomadic concentrate carried on the road, sucked slowly or dissolved in water.
[ ] Try chak-chak and shelpek
    Chak-chak is fried dough in honey; shelpek are thin fried flatbreads baked on days of remembrance. Both are on the table from the start.
[ ] Buy dried fruit and nuts
    Dried apricots, raisins, whole apricots, walnuts and roasted seeds at the Green Bazaar. The Almaty aport apple, once famous, is rare now but findable.
[ ] Try kumys
    Mare's milk fermented until lightly fizzy and sour, with a trace of alcohol. Seasonal: fresh kumys runs from May to September.
[ ] Try shubat
    Camel milk fermented to a thick, sour drink, denser and richer than kumys. Drunk chilled, and the taste is closest to a very sour kefir.
[ ] Drink tea with milk
    Strong black tea with milk, salt or butter, poured into part-filled bowls and topped up constantly. Drunk all day and especially in the heat.

Checklist from Unload: https://unloads.me/c/food-almaty