What to Eat in Armenia: Typical Armenian Food and Specialties | Page 3 of 4
Matnakash: Armenian Leavened Bread with Finger Grooves
Matnakash is an Armenian leavened bread with five or six grooves that the baker draws into the raw dough with his fingers - hence the name, "pulled with the fingers". Next to lavash it's the younger, thicker cousin: mass-produced only since the 1930s, sold in Russia under someone else's name, good for just a few days. A loaf from a Yerevan supermarket travels home in your hand and gets eaten the same day.
Armenian Apricots: The National Fruit That Gave the Flag Its Color
In Armenia the apricot is more than a fruit: the bottom stripe of the flag is called apricot, the national instrument is cut from apricot wood, and apricots get sung about at folk festivals and at Eurovision alike. The Latin name Prunus armeniaca, meanwhile, tells a small lie about where the fruit comes from. This article explains where the apricot really began, how Armenians eat it and dry it, and why its wood makes music.
Aveluk: Wild Sorrel Dried in Braids
Aveluk is wild sorrel gathered in the mountains of Armenia in spring, dried and braided into long ropes that are sold at the markets. It soaks overnight before cooking, then becomes a salad with onion, garlic and walnuts, or a soup. The plant and the drying are shared with eastern Turkey; the braids are an Armenian thing.
Basturma: Cured Beef in a Spiced Crust
Basturma is beef that's salted, pressed under a weight, air-dried and coated in a red paste of fenugreek, paprika and garlic, then eaten cold in thin slices. The whole former Ottoman and Caucasian world shares it and three nations argue over who invented it, even though the only documented record leads to 17th-century Kayseri. In Yerevan I ate it baked into an omelet for breakfast.
Ararat: The Armenian Brandy They Call Cognac at Home
Ararat is an Armenian brandy made from grapes of the Ararat plain that nobody at home calls anything but cognac - and the European Union paid Armenia three million euros to drop the word by 2043. What is true about Churchill and Stalin, why Yerevan has two distilleries sharing one family tree, and how a tasting of three ages at the brand's museum turned out.
Noy: The Armenian Brandy That Used to Be Called Ararat
Noy is Yerevan's second great brandy, aging in cellars on the site of the old Erivan Fortress. It didn't take the name of the biblical Noah until 2002; before that the product was called Ararat. The factory was founded in 1877 by the merchant Nerses Tairyan, and it was made famous by the Russian merchant Shustov, who entered its cognac anonymously and won the Grand Prix in Paris.
Armenian Wine: Areni, Karas and the Argument Over the Cradle of Wine
The label on the Armenian wine Karas promises 6,200 years and the Areni-1 cave gives that number something to stand on - with a catch that Georgia likes to bring up. I write about the native Areni and Voskehat grapes, about the clay karas that has no say in how the wine tastes, about the diaspora that brought winemaking back after the Soviet era, and about three bottles from a Yerevan shop at 3,500 to 9,000 AMD.
Tan: The Armenian Salty Drink Made from Matsun Yogurt
Tan is a salty Armenian drink made from matsun - fermented milk thinned with water - a thinner, sharper cousin of Turkish ayran, without the foam, and just as often fizzy, minty or flavored with cucumber. What its name means, why Armenia and Georgia are arguing over matsun, how tan differs from ayran and doogh, and what a glass of homemade tan cost me at Lavash Restaurant in Yerevan.
Jermuk: Armenian Mineral Water from a Mountain Spa Town
Jermuk is Armenia's best-known mineral water and at the same time a spa town in Vayots Dzor, where hundreds of hot springs rise out of the ground. The word jermuk means hot spring in Armenian; the water is sodium-rich, faintly salty and heavily carbonated, and it has been bottled since 1951. Restaurants all over Armenia serve it in a small glass bottle, and in the colonnade in Jermuk you drink it straight from the spring.
Armenian Beer: Kilikia, Gyumri and the Drink Xenophon Drank
Armenian beer is today almost without exception a pale lager made from water, barley malt and hops, and in a country of wine and brandy it stands in the shadow of both - even though the country brews more of it than it makes wine. In Armenian it is called garejur, literally barley water, and the oldest description of beer from Armenian soil comes from Xenophon's Anabasis. The biggest brands are Kilikia, Kotayk and Gyumri.