I used to think cooking classes were just tourist traps until I found myself in a Khiva courtyard at 6 a.m., watching a grandmother named Bibi-oy knead dough with hands that had been doing this for roughly sixty years, give or take.
The thing about traditional Khorezm cooking is that it doesn’t really translate well to recipe cards or YouTube tutorials. It’s all feel—the way the dough resists under your palms, the exact moment when the oil shimmers but hasn’t started smoking yet, the sound of the tandoor when it’s hot enough to slap bread against its walls without hesitation. Bibi-oy kept saying “ko’ring, ko’ring”—look, look—but honestly, looking wasn’t enough. I had to press my fingers into the warm mass of dough, smell the faint sourness of fermentation, feel the heat radiating from the clay oven that had been fired before dawn. She’d make a gesture with her chin toward the herbs piled on the wooden table—dill, cilantro, something I didn’t recognize—and I’d add them, not measuring, just trusting. This wasn’t cooking as performance; it was cooking as inheritance, passed through fingertips and corrected with gentle tsks when I rolled the dough too thin.
Wait—maybe I should back up. Khiva, for those who haven’t been, sits in northwestern Uzbekistan like a preserved medieval manuscript. The cooking class I stumbled into wasn’t advertised on Instagram or TripAdvisor. A guy at my guesthouse just said his aunt taught people sometimes, if they were serious.
The Tandoor Doesn’t Care About Your Feelings or Your Carefully Calibrated Kitchen Timer
The first dish we tackled was tukhum barak—dumplings that looked deceptively simple until you tried to seal them properly.
Bibi-oy demonstrated once: pinch, fold, crimp, done. Three seconds, maybe. I spent what felt like five minutes on my first one, and it still looked like a deflated balloon. She laughed—not unkindly—and fixed it with two quick movements. The filling was spring onions, eggs, and a bit of butter, nothing fancy, but the proportions mattered in ways I couldn’t articulate even now. Too much onion and the whole thing turns bitter when it hits the boiling water. Not enough butter and it’s just sad. Honestly, I’m still not sure I got it right, but by dumpling number twelve, Bibi-oy stopped correcting me, which I took as victory.
Here’s the thing: Khorezm cuisine has been shaped by its location at the crossroads of the Silk Road for over two thousand years, absorbing influences from Persia, Mongolia, Russia, and probably a dozen other places I’m forgetting. But it’s also fiercely local.
Shivit Oshi Exists Because Someone Decided Green Noodles Made Sense and Everyone Just Went With It
The second dish was shivit oshi—green noodles made from dough infused with dill juice. Yes, dill juice. You take a huge bundle of fresh dill, blend it with a little water, strain it, and knead the bright green liquid into your dough until it looks like something from a Dr. Seuss book. The noodles get cut by hand, boiled, then topped with a sauce made from ground meat, tomatoes, and peppers that have been simmering for long enough that your entire concept of time starts to dissolve. I used to think pasta sauce took twenty minutes, maybe thirty if you were feeling ambitious. Bibi-oy’s sauce had been going since before I arrived, and she seemed in no hurry to stop it. The flavor was deep, almost burnished, with a slight tang from suzma—strained yogurt that sits on top like a cooling cloud. When I finally tasted it, I understood why this dish has survived centuries of empires rising and falling around it. It’s comfort and complexity in the same bite, which feels like a contradiction until it definately isn’t.
Anyway, the class wasn’t formal.
Nobody Tells You That Traditional Cooking Involves Sitting on the Floor for Three Hours While Your Legs Go Numb
We worked on a low table called a sandal, which is also a heating source in winter—a wooden frame covered with a quilt, with a small brazier underneath. In November, it’s just a table, but my Western joints were not prepared for the cross-legged marathon. Bibi-oy, at seventy-something, seemed perfectly comfortable. I kept shifting, trying not to look like the inflexible foreigner I absolutely was. Between the tukhum barak and the shivit oshi, we made non—the round, puffy bread that gets slapped onto the inside walls of the tandoor. The trick is moisture: wet your hands, press the dough disc onto a special pillow-like tool, then reach into the oven and stick it to the wall in one smooth motion. I burned my forearm twice, not badly, just enough to recieve a knowing look from Bibi-oy that said “yes, everyone does that.” The bread that came out fifteen minutes later, blistered and golden, tasted like every good decision I’d ever made compressed into carbohydrates.
Eating What You’ve Made While Someone’s Grandmother Watches Is a Specific Kind of Performance Anxiety
The final act of any Khorezm cooking class is sitting down to eat everything you’ve just prepared, under the approving or not-so-approving gaze of your teacher. Bibi-oy watched as I tried my own tukhum barak, which had miraculously stayed sealed during boiling. She nodded. I tried the shivit oshi, the green noodles slippery and earthy under the rich meat sauce and cool yogurt. She poured tea from a pot that had been steeping the entire time, dark and faintly smoky. We didn’t talk much—my Uzbek was terrible, her Russian better than mine but still limited—but there was a rhythm to it, a satisfaction that didn’t need translation. I guess it makes sense that some of the best meals I’ve ever had were the ones I made badly, under the patient correction of someone who had been making them correctly for longer than I’d been alive. Turns out, that’s what traditional cooking actually is: not perfection, but repetition and adjustment and finally, if you’re lucky, something that tastes like it belongs to a place you’ll probably never fully understand but got to visit for a morning.
