GIANT CENTRAL FOOD TOURISM in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan | MUST TRY!

Central Asia. One of the most beautiful and unique regions on earth. With a rich history at the heart of the Silk Road, incredible natural landscapes and remnants of the great empires that have passed through its borders. But what mark has all of this left on the food? In our opinion one of the tastiest, heartiest and most varied on the planet. We're in Bishkek and we're on our way to a chai or traditional tea house to try some of the most beautiful dishes. Let's do it. Right so we've ordered five possibly six dishes because the waitress recommended us something we couldn't say no to. So it's on the way now. Can't wait. I'm so excited. We obviously ordered some tea and it's delicious. It's got some apples in there. Loves an apple. Loves an apple that girl. So we ordered bread to go with the food and the waitress recommended us this which is a national Kyrgyz dish called Borsok and it's basically like a little donut and she put a sauce for us to dip in as well. Let's give it a go. Cheers. It's like a little cloud of joy. It's like a non-sweet donut basically. Really good and the sauce is a really thick creamy slightly garlicky sauce. Amazing. Perfect starter. The food's arrived. Right let's dig into the Beshbarmak which is actually the national dish here in Kyrgyzstan. So the noodles are really nice. It's really lightly spiced. It's not a strong tasting dish at all. It's usually served with horse meat but we ordered it with beef and yeah it's really good. It's almost like a soup in the bottom as well. I didn't expect that. It just gives it just like a meaty broth. Ramen. These are Manti which are central Asian dumplings. We ordered them fried and steamed. These are the fried Manti. They're filled with lamb meat, spices, a meaty broth. These ones also have potato and onion and they're wrapped in a beautifully crunchy pastry. It's full of onion. We also ordered the more traditional steamed Manti. These were filled with an amazing spiced pumpkin potato and onion puree. The soft tender pastry just melts in your mouth and the pumpkin puree gives the Manti a slightly sweet but beautiful kick. Incredible. This soup is called Shurpo. It's meat broth with large chunks of potatoes, carrots and meat topped with fresh parsley. Despite having a few ingredients this soup would keep you going a long way as it's very meaty and wholesome. This is Lagman. This one is fried. You can have it with broth as well like soup or ramen. And there are noodles, spiced beautiful noodles, packed with vegetables. It's like a wok basically. And let's try fried horse soup. This one's actually a bit spicy. It's packed with vegetables. You've got onion, lots of different peppers, even cabbage in this one. It's so fragrant and incredibly rich because we could order it with chicken or I think lamb. We ordered it with beef and it's just so comforting and filling and just satisfying. Perfect autumn dish. Lagman's the perfect dish any time of the year. Let's be honest. Yeah, we'll make it. Okay so we also ordered a salad called Shakara basically for a bit of colour and a little bit of a balance because we're really meat based here so we needed some veg and some salad to balance it. Okay so that's the taster's done. We've got a big challenge ahead of us so let's get on with it. I reckon we can do it. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. We're strong. Well that was hard work. I feel like I need a nap right now. Well I've actually been bitten so we've taken some with us. So the thing is with Central Asian food and that meal was a great example of it is it's so varied. Like it's varied to Central Asia itself. You've got influence from Chinese food, influence from more Middle Eastern cuisines. The Beshbarmak and the Shorpol was like the food of the steppes whereas the Lagman was a lot more East Asian almost tasting. It is so varied and the history of the Silk Road has a lot to do with that. Speaking of the Silk Road, in Hiva, Uzbekistan, we tried shivit orshi which are noodles made with dill and served with meat, potatoes and meaty sauce on top. They're very fresh and have a light taste. Also we tried these local dumplings that are stuffed with egg. Very unusual but incredibly tasty. And this is chiburek which is a deep fried dough with meat and onion inside. It is the go-to street food snack across Central Asia. To be honest my food of choice was Lagman all the time. Thick noodles with meat, onion, carrots and peppers in a beautifully spiced broth. It is very fragrant and meaty, hearty and incredibly satisfying. Plov is a way of life in Central Asia. In Tashkent, Uzbekistan, we got the chance to see how this beauty was made from scratch which was a mesmerizing process. Afterwards we tried three different types of plov. We have a full video about it on our channel which we'll link down below so make sure you check it out. Another popular street snack in Central Asia is samsa similar to the Indian samosa. It is made in tandoor oven and we tried it in the city of Osh in Kyrgyzstan. The link of the full Osh video is below. This is ashlan fu, a fragrant spicy noodle soup which is actually eaten cold. It's the local dish of Karakol in eastern Kyrgyzstan and it's the national dish of the Dongan people, a Chinese diaspora who fled here from Qing China. This was arguably the most East Asian dish we tried in Central Asia. The vinegar-based broth mixed with the chili paste, fresh spring onion, starch and wheat noodles was an unbelievable combination. kurdak, homemade style kurdak and soup that's called chuchvara. So we've been working all day and we are so hungry now. It is two o'clock, we haven't had breakfast, we were like we're going to order later so we'll just wait. Far too long. So let's start with this soup that's called chuchvara and it looks incredibly delicious. Let's try it. And it is incredibly delicious. It's really fragrant, it's tomatoey, you can taste coriander there, garlic, onion. It's really delicious. Now I want to try some dumplings. So chuchvara is a dumpling soup, it's full of little dumplings in here. Good. Meat inside. It's full of fresh herbs as well. Incredibly comforting. All the food seems to be so filling, wholesome and really really comforting. I'll try a bit more of that broth. That is so nice. It's ever so slightly spicy as well. Just a little. Just a little little bit and like you said, the freshness of the herbs come through, the tomatoeyness, the meaty dumplings. That is awesome. I think, to be honest, that might be one of my favourite dishes we've tried. I agree. It's really good. I really like them. Right, where are we moving next? Do you want to go for narin? Let's go for narin. So narin is similar to beshbarmak that we tried the other day and it's a noodle dish traditionally with horse meat which is popular throughout Central Asia. And here we've got some onions and some dill with it as well. And yeah, we've got beef here, however we have traditional, I think it's called kazi, which is a horse sausage. Yeah. And this broth came alongside the narin, so you're supposed to have them together. So let's try and get them both in at once. Oh my god, pressure. You would normally just mix it, we don't have bowls, that would fit it. To be honest, I actually prefer that to beshbarmak, if I'm honest. That's a lot more subtle, you've tried it already, yeah. That's a lot more subtle tasting and the noodles themselves are a lot, they fall apart, don't they? They're a different texture. And yeah, beshbarmak is a lot meatier, a lot heavier and this feels a lot more comforting, softer. Which is strange because you think like, it looks like there is a lot more meat here. Yeah. Because of the way it's sort of served, because in beshbarmak you have like big, bigger chunks of meat. Maybe that's why. Right, so let's try the kazi. Oh, and a bit of noodle. It is nice. Is it a distinctive, like, different flavour to any other meat or does it taste similar to something? It's not very strong tasting, to be honest, at all. You've got the layer of fat in here as well that gives it two different textures. It's not actually a particularly chewy meat, it's quite soft, it falls apart in your mouth. If it's similar to anything, I would say it's similar to beef, similar tasting to beef. But yeah, it's nice. Happy we tried it. Let's try the kurduk. Ladies first. So here we have, this is essentially like a homemade, simple dish. Fried potatoes with some meat and plenty of onion. Onion. Plenty of onion. Okay, I'm just going to... Okay, hold it, go home. I mean, I adore fried potato. Is it really heavily spiced or... No, quite, so just quite a plain, simple dish. It is what it is. There's nothing really much you can add. It's just a fried potato with some meat and onion. It is simple, it is delicious, it's not strongly flavoured or any, like, spices or herbs added to it. It's pretty and it's simple. I think these two dishes in particular are a lot more reflective of nomadic people. I think there's some of the dishes we tried yesterday, like lagman and stuff, there's a lot of spices and herbs and vegetables involved as well. Whereas these are simple, there's a few ingredients put together really well. And I think, yeah, that reflects the nomadic people. They can't bring a lot of things along with them when they're travelling across the steppe, etc. So... Like us. Like us. Maybe we should carry some beshparmak with us. Right, and last but not least, this is gosh naan, which is a meat and onion naan. Naan, you might recognise the name, similar to Indian naan. Again, there's a lot of similarities of food and history that was passed across the Silk Road. And here in Central Asia, they eat a lot of bread cooked in tandoor ovens and also naan like this, which is fried, isn't it? Yeah. So let's dig in. I think this is going to be similar to a chiburek, if I'm not mistaken. It's like a really good quality chiburek. Really good. Perfect. I think that, to be honest, would be perfect dipped in the chuchvara broth. Okay, that's the tasting done, but we're going to attack first. See? Yeah. I'm down. I'm down. And we've got a dessert. This is chak-chak. And essentially, it's a tartar dessert, but it's eaten all over Central Asia. And this is a deep-fried dough, and then it's coated in syrup. And here we have some raisins with it as well. And it is quite popular throughout Russia as well, so I'm really familiar with this. Sweet treat. And, oh yeah, I wanted to say that baklava is really popular here as well. They just didn't have it in this place. We did order baklava, yeah. They cancelled it. So chak-chak was found, as Julia said, in Tatarstan, which is a Muslim region of Russia, but it's also really popular in Central Asia. And they have their own varieties in different places. I think there's a Bukhara version of chak-chak, a Tajik version of chak-chak. So yeah, again, it's all been passed throughout the region, and we couldn't resist having a dessert of some sort. Not showing it to you more than anything. Oh, there are some walnuts as well. Nice. It's easier to eat it with your hands, I bet, than this. This does not go well. The raisins go really well there. It's really crunchy. It's very sweet. It's like a deep-fried biscuit, almost coated in syrup. Yeah, because of the syrup, it's very soft on the outside, but then the inside of the biscuit itself is still crunchy, so there's like a real difference of textures as well. It's not like soaked completely, that it's all like smooshy mass. No, just a little bit of syrup on the outside. My family used to make chak-chak very often. Really? Because it's easier to make it. And it's really sweet, and a lot sweeter. Especially your grandma. With tea all the time, yeah? Chak-chak and tea. And on that mouth-watering note, that's the end of our food video here in Central Asia. Which one of these foods was your favorite? Let us know down below. And thanks for watching, see you in the next one! We're in Czech Republic. We just sat down, and the waitress brought us some drinks to try. That is very sour. Yes, very unusual, but that's exactly the same one as we tried in the dish cake video. I forgot what it's called. I'll write it down. You try it yourself. Let's try the meat as well. It's now three o'clock. 3.15. Can you help me?