Achichuk and Uzbek Salads
The tomato and onion salad that comes with plov, the Korean carrot on every bazaar counter, and the mayonnaise salads inherited from the Soviet century.
Uzbek main courses are rich, fatty and heavy. The salads exist to deal with that, and the most important one has three ingredients.
If you order plov and nothing else, you are eating the dish wrong. Here is what should be on the table beside it.
Achichuk
Also written achichuk, achik-chuchuk or shakarob depending on the region and the menu, this is the national accompaniment to plov: ripe tomatoes and onion, sliced very thin, with a little salt and often fresh basil or coriander.
There is no oil and no vinegar. The dressing is the tomato juice and the salt, and the sharpness comes from the onion, which is sometimes rinsed in cold water first to take the edge off.
Done well, it is superb, and it is entirely dependent on the tomatoes. In August, with Uzbek summer tomatoes, this is one of the best salads anywhere. In February it is a pale imitation, which is worth knowing before you judge it.
Eat it with the plov rather than before it. The acidity cuts the fat, and Uzbeks will tell you that is not just pleasant but digestively necessary.
Shakarob and the variations
The same salad appears under different names with small changes.
- Shakarob often includes more herbs and sometimes a spoonful of qatiq, the sour yoghurt, stirred through.
- With chilli in the south, where the food is generally spicier.
- With cucumber added, which is common in restaurants and purists consider a dilution.
- With radish in spring, when local radishes are good.
Order it by name in a restaurant. If you just ask for salad you will often be brought something with mayonnaise in it.
The Korean counter
Every Uzbek bazaar has a row of stalls selling prepared salads in trays: spiced carrot in long shreds, marinated aubergine, cabbage, mushrooms, beans, seaweed, fern.
These come from the Koryo-saram, Koreans deported from the Soviet Far East to Central Asia in 1937, who settled here in large numbers and whose food has become a normal part of the Uzbek diet. The best known is morkovcha, Korean carrot salad, which is now sold in Russian supermarkets as a Korean dish and is in fact a Central Asian invention.
The counter is cheap, sold by weight, and the sellers expect you to taste before buying. For vegetarians it is the single most useful food resource in the country, as our vegetarian guide explains.
The Soviet inheritance
The other family on every menu came with the 20th century and is built on mayonnaise.
Olivier, called Russian salad elsewhere: diced potato, carrot, peas, pickles, egg and sausage or chicken, bound with mayonnaise. Ubiquitous, especially at celebrations.
Tashkent salad, the local contribution and genuinely good: boiled beef or tongue, green radish cut into fine strips, egg, and fried onion, dressed with mayonnaise or sour cream. It appears on menus across the country and is worth ordering once.
Vinegret, beetroot, potato, carrot and pickles, dressed with oil rather than mayonnaise, and the most vegetarian-friendly of the group.
Be a little careful with these in high summer, when mayonnaise-based dishes sitting in a warm display case are the classic cause of a bad night; our health guide covers the sensible rules.
Why the salads matter more than they look
It is easy to dismiss a plate of sliced tomato as filler beside a cauldron of plov. In this cuisine it is doing real work.
Uzbek cooking runs on lamb fat and the tail fat of fat-tailed sheep, used as a cooking medium in plov, dimlama, manti and most fried dishes. That produces enormous flavour and a heaviness that needs answering, and the answer is acid: raw onion, tomato, vinegar in the pickles, sour yoghurt on the soups.
There is a seasonal logic too. The region has a short, spectacular growing season and a long winter, so the summer table is dominated by fresh raw vegetables and the winter table by things preserved in the autumn. A jar of pickled tomatoes opened in February is the same vegetable eaten six months later, and the pickling traditions here are correspondingly strong.
This also explains why the salads are underwhelming in the wrong season. An achichuk made from greenhouse tomatoes in January is not a bad version of a good dish; it is a dish being made outside the months it belongs to. Eat them in summer and autumn and you will understand why Uzbeks treat them as essential rather than optional.
Pickles and the rest of the table
A proper Uzbek table, the dastarkhan, is laid before anyone sits down, and the cold dishes are part of the setting rather than a course.
Expect bread, always. Then some combination of pickled cucumbers, pickled tomatoes, pickled cabbage and pickled garlic, particularly in winter; fresh herbs in a bunch, to be torn and eaten as they are; sliced cucumber and tomato; nuts and dried fruit; sweets and boiled sweets; and a pot of tea.
Nothing here is an appetiser in the European sense. It stays on the table for the whole meal, including after the main course arrives, and you graze from it throughout.
Our guide to being a guest in an Uzbek home explains the conventions around the dastarkhan, which matter more in a house than in a restaurant.
Making achichuk at home
It is barely a recipe, which is why it is worth getting right.
Use the best tomatoes you can find, ripe rather than firm, and slice them thinly rather than chopping them into cubes, so they release juice. Slice a white onion as thinly as you can manage; if it is harsh, rinse it in cold water and drain. Layer them, salt lightly, add torn basil or coriander, and leave for ten minutes before serving so the juices come out.
No oil, no vinegar, no sugar. If you are eating it with plov, put the bowl in the middle of the table and let people take it with each mouthful rather than serving it on separate plates.
For the rest of the menu, see our Uzbek food guide.
Featured image: Shuhrataxmedov (CC BY-SA 3.0) via Wikimedia Commons.