Qurut – kurut in Kyrgyz and Kazakh, qurt in Uzbek, close kin to Mongolian aaruul – is yogurt that has been strained, salted, shaped into small balls or discs and dried until hard. It’s sour, salty and chalky, eaten as a snack across Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Afghanistan, and soaked and crushed into a sour liquid that dresses Afghan dishes such as ashak and kichri qurut. Like many dried dairy foods of pastoral peoples, it turns summer’s milk into something that keeps through winter.
What’s in It
Qurut starts as a lactic ferment. Sequencing of kurut from several regions of Kyrgyzstan found Lactobacillus the dominant bacterial genus, followed by Streptococcus, Enterococcus and Lactococcus (Yegin et al., 2024). An analysis of eight common Kyrgyz kuruts found an average of 14.6% protein and 1.8% fat – and a lot of salt: home-made kurut contained about 3.5 times the 2–3% salt set by the standard, while two factory brands had 5.8–5.9%. Kurut was eaten by about 80% of 7,251 Kyrgyz teenagers surveyed, and daily by about one in five, which led the authors to call for less salt (Kochkorova & Kitarova, 2021). So enjoy qurut as a salty snack or seasoning, not a protein bar.
Making It Safely
Traditional qurut is often made from raw milk. Raw milk can carry harmful germs that souring doesn’t reliably remove (CDC), so the recipe card starts with yogurt made from pasteurized milk – see our yogurt guide, or use plain live store-bought yogurt. Strain it thick, salt it at about 2–3% of the strained weight, and dry the balls somewhere warm and airy until they’re hard right through. In humid weather, use a very low oven: balls that stay soft in the middle can grow mold. Discard any with fuzzy mold. Central Asia’s other fermented milks include Kazakh camel-milk shubat.
Relatives
Strained yogurt is a whole family: fresh labneh, spiced and aged shanklish, and Turkish tarhana, where yogurt and grain are fermented and dried together.