What to eat in Turkmenistan
Turkmen cooking: lamb plov and chorba, dograma, tandoor-baked ishlekli, chekdirme, Akhal melons, Caspian fish, camel-milk chal and green tea.

[ ] Try dograma
    Churek bread crumbled by hand with boiled lamb and onion, covered with hot meat broth. A festive and ritual dish, prepared for major occasions.
[ ] Eat ishlekli
    A large round pie of chopped lamb and onion baked in hot ash or a tandoor. It comes from Balkan province and is cut into wedges like a pie.
[ ] Try chekdirme
    Lamb fried with potato, tomato and onion in a cauldron until it becomes a thick stew. A home dish, also cooked over a fire on the road.
[ ] Eat Turkmen plov
    Rice with lamb, carrot and onion cooked in a cauldron: a close relative of the Uzbek version, but more often with dried fruit and less cumin.
[ ] Try chorba
    A rich lamb-on-the-bone soup with coarsely cut potato, carrot and tomato. The everyday first course.
[ ] Eat gutap
    Fried half-moon pastries filled with meat, herbs or pumpkin. Street and home food, eaten hot and by hand.
[ ] Get churek from the tandoor
    A round tandoor flatbread baked daily and served with everything. Bread here is torn by hand and never placed upside down.
[ ] Try Caspian fish
    Pike-perch, carp and sturgeon from the Caspian, fried, baked or cured as balyk. In the west, around Turkmenbashi and Awaza, the fish is fresh and cheap.
[ ] Try manti and borek
    Large steamed manti filled with lamb, pumpkin or camel, and borek, boiled dumplings in broth. Everyday home cooking.
[ ] Try Turkmen melons
    Melons from Akhal and Mary provinces: dense, fragrant and very sweet. They have a national holiday of their own on the second Sunday of August.
[ ] Try pishme
    Diamonds of fried dough, puffy inside, put on the table with tea. Simple baking made when guests arrive.
[ ] Buy dried fruit and halva
    Dried apricots, raisins, dried melon, whole apricots and sesame halva: what sits on the table from the start and what travellers take home.
[ ] Drink green tea
    Unsweetened green tea from a bowl filled a third of the way: the drink of the day and the first answer to heat. It is refilled constantly.
[ ] Try chal
    Fermented camel milk: sour, faintly fizzy and refreshing. A desert drink regarded as restorative.
[ ] Try agaran and ayran
    Agaran is thick, rich camel milk cream eaten with churek; ayran is a diluted salted fermented milk drink.

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