🌍 Central Asia

Central Asia is a region of steppes, deserts and mountains in the heart of Eurasia, long home to nomadic herders. Central Asia is a land of steppes, semi-deserts and the mountains of the Tian Shan and Pamir, stretching between the Caspian Sea and the Altai. On our page it covers Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan, together with Mongolia, which shares a similar way of life. For centuries nomadic herders roamed here, driving their herds from pasture to pasture and living on what their animals gave them.

People milk cows, sheep and goats, as well as mares and camels. FAO notes that mare's milk is drunk specifically on the steppes of Central Asia: a mare is milked 5–6 times a day, and she lets down her milk only with her foal beside her. According to FAOSTAT, in 2023 Kazakhstan had 3.9 million horses and Mongolia 4.8 million. Altogether the six countries produced 21 million tonnes of milk, more than half of it in Uzbekistan, at 11.9 million tonnes.

Mare's milk is fermented into koumiss, called airag in Mongolia: a lactic drink with a little alcohol. Camel milk becomes shubat, while soured milk is pressed and dried into kurt (qurut). UNESCO has inscribed on its intangible heritage list the spring rites of Kazakh horse breeders (2018), including the first milking of mares and the festival of the first koumiss, as well as the Mongolian technique of making airag in a leather vessel called the khokhuur (хөхүүр) (2019).

The region is rich in grapes too: Uzbekistan ranks fifth in the world for table grapes, with 1.4 million tonnes in 2024, and a large part of the crop is dried into raisins (OIV). Today the dairy traditions of the nomads live on alongside the cities: koumiss, shubat and kurt remain everyday food and part of festive occasions.

A Kazakh biochemist writes that the local milk is poorly suited to cheesemaking, so fermented drinks dominate, kumis above all, with shubat made from camel milk. The same paper dates kumis in Central Asia to roughly four thousand years ago. In Kazakhstan, an FAO report says, household farms produce about 90% of the milk, and surveys in Astana and Almaty show kumis seen as a symbol of health and national identity.