Azeri food: how to cook like a local

Want to learn about Azeri food? Looking for Azeri recipes? Read Anna Ansari's guide, then check out the guide to Armenian food or Napolese food.

Recipes extracted from Silk Roads: A Flavour Odyssey with Recipes from Baku to Beijing by Anna Ansari, out 9 October (£27, DK RED). Recipes are sent by the publisher and not retested by us.

Azeri cuisine

You could forgive a first-time visitor to Azerbaijan, fresh off the plane in Baku (psst – it’s an easy five-hour direct flight from London), for mistakenly thinking they’d stumbled into a celebration when they sit down for their first in-country meal. Whether at a local’s home or in a restaurant, meals in Azerbaijan are no paltry affairs. You’re likely to find, even for a simple afternoon tea break, tables heavy with multiple plates.

For breakfast or brunch this will likely mean pomidor yumurta (eggs with tomato), spinach chigirtma and/or narnumru (eggs and pomegranate), a platter of cheeses, a dish heaped with raw herbs, cucumber and tomatoes, a few bowls of yogurt, possibly a tomato salad (that’s my family’s move), probably honey and some jams, perhaps some olives – and definitely some fresh-from-the-tendir flatbread. And tea, of course. Always.

Lunch and dinner are similarly, if not far more, bountiful than the Azeri morning repast. Alongside the omnipresent herbs, tomato and cucumber platter, yogurt and cheeses, and fresh flatbread, you’re bound to find at least one wrapped or stuffed offering (I’m a particular fan of the diminutive pip dolma – morsels of spiced minced lamb wrapped in laurel leaves), a rice or noodle dish (or two), a raw tomato or grilled aubergine salad (or three), pickles, a few plates of fresh, seasonally appropriate fruit (don’t sleep on Azerbaijan’s wild spring strawberries) and at least one each of soup, fish and meat. When it comes to soups, I’m partial to dovga, a yogurty, herby version served in spring, summer and at wedding celebrations, as well as piti, a chestnut and lamb stew from the northern town of Sheki. I also love fish or chicken lavangi, a preparation native to the country’s southern Lankaran region that involves a rich and flavourful pomegranate and walnut stuffing, as well as minced beef or lamb lula kebab, and a chicken and egg combo known as chicken chigirtma.

Luckily Baku’s best restaurants (and homes) feature not only the capital city’s specialities (Baku’s take on dumplings, gurza, are delicately braided beauties that shouldn’t be missed) but also regional delights, which is a boon if your only stop in the Land of Eternal Fire is the Paris of the East. You’re likely going to be eating these feasts overlooking the glittering Caspian Sea and boulevards lined with intricate Italianate mansions built by 20th-century oil magnates, or in restored Silk Roads trading caravanserai. A magical, extraordinary cuisine in a magical, extraordinary country – or now, happily, in your kitchen.

Azeri recipes

Azeri tomato salad

Azeris love walnuts. And I love this salad which has walnuts in it. The sweet juices of the tomatoes mix with pomegranate juice, walnuts, flat-leaf parsley, red onion and nothing else. No oil. No vinegar. A salad of pure alchemy, pure harmony. A surprise. A revelation.

Dovga Azeri (warm yogurt soup)

This Azeri yogurt soup also happens to be a wedding soup. How’s that for refined and special? And, while it can be and sometimes is eaten cold, dovga’s default temperature is warm. You read that correctly. This is a warm yogurt soup. And it’s weird and wonderful, and kind of a game-changer.

Spinach chigirtma (Azeri spinach and eggs)

While scholarship has stumbled over the precise date and means of spinach’s transmission from West to East, it is generally accepted that the so-called “chieftain of leafy greens” (as spinach was dubbed by the 12th-century Arab-Andalusian agriculturalist Ibn al-’Awwãm) arrived in China, in seed form, from Iran via Nepal in the middle of the 7th century CE. Special and rare enough to be sent as tribute from the Nepalese king to the Tang Court in Chang’an, spinach is now a mainstay on tables across the world.