Uzbek Garlic Recipes

Uzbek cuisine — Plov, samsa, lagman — hearty Silk Road cooking from the heart of Central Asia — brings its own distinctive techniques and seasonings to every ingredient it touches. When Uzbek cooks work with garlic, they reach for its own regional aromatics, fats and signature spice blends, and the techniques that come up most across these recipes are simmering, boiling, steaming and caramelising.

The aromatic foundation of savoury cooking almost everywhere — pungent raw, sweet and mellow when cooked. In this collection it's most often cooked with ground cumin, fine sea salt, carrots, long-grain rice, onions and tomatoes. The dishes here span uzbek classics ready in as little as 32 minutes to slower, more involved cooking that rewards a relaxed afternoon.