Siberia Dining: Local Specialties

The Minusinsk Hollow challenges the assumption of Siberia being a permanently cold place with its 300 sunny days each year.

Even as all of Russia has heard of or tasted Altai honey, few people know much of kurut, a traditional dish of Central Asian nomads.

Sour milk is filtered and mixed with salt before being rolled into small balls and dried in the fresh air or the smoke of the hearth with the latter technique giving kurut a strong smoky taste.

Pelmeni is a staple of Siberian cuisine. Still, the many peoples that inhabit the region possess their own varieties of minced meat wrapped in dough. 

The filling is extremely diverse and includes fish, potatoes, wild herbs, as well as meat. But it is meat, or rather two sorts of meat, such as beef and pork popular now or game common in the past, that is the classic deal. 

Made from the same kind of dough as pelmeni, Buryat buuz, another dumpling variety, is usually larger, folded differently, and steamed.

Sometimes, frozen fish will be struck repeatedly with a heavy object until it crumbles into pieces producing raskolotka (“shattered fish”) or chopped into larger pieces, which is rubanina (“chopped fish”). It is always served frozen.

More popular are whitefish breeds: broad whitefish, muksun, nelma and peled. In summer, raw fish may be slightly salted and sliced to make a dish called sugudai.

Siberian taiga is predominantly coniferous with pines, cedars, spruces, firs and larches. One of the region’s food symbols are nuts, which are consumed raw or fried, or used in baking. In a recent development, these nuts have become a source of the “pine milk”, a fine substitute for cow milk for the lactose intolerant.

Younger and softer fir and pine scones are brewed into astringent amber-coloured jam, which is both a good dessert and a flavour that goes well with meat. 

Siberia’s favourite pastry looks very much like Russian vatrushka. If a vatrushka is a bun with a lower part in the middle for cottage cheese or jam filling, a shanga is rarely sweet and has its filling smeared on top.

The more common varieties of these, in addition to dozens more found in Siberian bakeries across the region, are sour cream and mashed potatoes.

From Evenks and Dolgans to Cossacks and Archangelsk settlers — all Siberians have drawn from the cornucopia of forest berries to flavour their cuisine. Berries are used to this day to bake cake, ferment cabbages, make tea and, of course, jam.

Burkovsky and Ivanov, two of Novosibirsk's foremost restaurateurs, have followed different, yet equally successful, approaches to promoting Siberian cuisine. Apart from several restaurants, Vladimir Burkovsky has founded the Centre for Siberian Cuisine, which explores the region's culinary past.