Being a baker in Uzbekistan is a truly hazardous occupation.
The bread here is delicious, by the way – it’s very crispy on the outside and light and fluffy in the middle. It’s being baked constantly throughout the day and loaded onto little trolleys to be sold in the market and in the streets. And if you fancy branching out from the standard round loaf, you can even buy a platter or a bowl made of bread to serve your food in.
So, where’s the danger? I hear you ask. Well, the bakers’ ovens over here are enormous – more like terracotta huts – and the baker has to climb inside to stick the discs of dough onto the sides to be cooked by the fire that’s burning at the bottom of the oven, which is just about at groin level as he leans into the heat. I watched a baker for ten minutes constantly disappearing into the oven either to slap the dough onto the wall, or to peel the cooked loaves off the wall, and apart from a much-needed sweat band and cap, he had no protective gear at all. I can’t see the bakers at Gail’s clambering into the oven to test the crust on their sourdough – much too dangerous.
The national dish is called plov, and you find it absolutely everywhere. Apparently you can’t come to Uzbekistan without learning how to make plov, so we went to a local family’s home in Samarkand for a cookery lesson. The plov was cooked in an enormous pot over a calor gas stove in the summer kitchen, which is a kitchen without walls opening onto the central courtyard of the house, much cooler for cooking on those scorching desert summer days.
This plov was cooked in the Samarkand style, which is to say that the meat is cooked first for two hours, and then carrots, onions, chick peas and garlic are cooked together in oil, and finally the rice is tied in a muslin cloth and steamed on top of the vegetables. I wasn’t sure exactly why it was so important to keep the rice separate, as everything was mixed together afterwards, but we were assured that it makes all the difference.
The plov made an impressive centrepiece for the dinner. And of course we rounded off the evening with a karaoke rendition of All You Need is Plov … t-shirts optional.
Noodles and dumplings are staples in Uzbekistan and our next cookery lesson was dill noodles. We were taught by a wonderful old crone – Central Asia seems to do crones better than anyone else in the world – and I volunteered to have a go at rolling out the dill noodles, which is much harder work than it looks. I have to admit that I was partly persuaded by the black gloves, which make even the most prosaic activity look fairly raunchy.
Then we sat on the rooftop and enjoyed the dill noodles, served alongside a spectacular view of the sun setting over Khiva.
And who even cares what the food’s like when you have a view like this to enjoy?