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- As a child in newly independent Kazakhstan, I yearned to snack on candy bars, soft drinks and anything foreign and packaged. Instead, my mother would buy salty, sour snacks that resembled white chocolate truffles, but were in fact hardened balls of sour cheese. At local bazaars, I'd see aunties cheerfully selling small batches of these homemade goods packed in cellophane.
A Central Asian dry cheese made of fermented milk, qurt is a versatile treasure of nomadic people's ingenuity. There are variations of names for this food, including kashk in Iran, chortan in Armenia, and aaruul in Mongolia, as this calcium-rich, protein-packed snack accompanied travellers along the Silk Road and beyond.