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Travelling the Silk Road as a dessert-lover can be magical. Travelling the Silk Road as a dairy-free dessert-lover? Slightly more… let’s say, character-building. While the ancient trade route spoils you with hearty dishes, flavour explosions and endless tea, the dessert menu can feel a little sparse. Especially if butter, cream or yoghurt are off the table. But fear not: sweet treats on the Silk Road do exist, you just have to look in the right places if you’re seeking a more traditional pudding.
Georgia
Georgian cuisine is both hearty and delicious. However, despite menus being filled to the brim with meat dishes and pairings with cheese, we consistently saw desserts being forgotten. Not to mention a lack of bakeries. This reality felt rather at odds with the endless lists of ‘traditional Georgian desserts’ we’d been promised online.
Quite disappointingly, we only came across three desserts. But that dismay was short-lived when we discovered two of them were dairy-free.
Often described as, “Georgian Snickers”, these candle-shaped sweets are made by dipping strings of nuts into thickened grape juice. Chewy, lightly sweet, utterly addictive and brilliantly dairy-free.
A simple but delicious pudding made from grape must and flour. It’s naturally dairy-free, silky, and surprisingly refreshing. Typically served with walnuts.
Wine ice cream
Exactly what it says on the tin. In some places the ice cream itself was wine flavoured. In others, the pairing would be vanilla ice cream with a helping of dessert wine poured on top.
Armenia
Although a neighbour to Georgia, Armenian cuisine is wholly different. That said it sings from a similar hymn sheet when it comes to the small list of sweet treat options.
In addition, if you are looking for an alternative milk to accompany your coffee or smoothie – “that’s not me” says Armenia.
Armenia’s answer to churchkhela. Sweet sujukh is made by wrapping nuts in fig, apricot, or even pomegranate juice to form a chewy candy coating. It is dairy-free and proud. Though make sure to ask for the sweet version else you’ll end up with a meat sausage.
Layers of filo pastry and nuts soaked in lemon-flavoured syrup.
Gata
A light oval-shaped sweet bread, filled with butter and sugar. Each region tweaks the components, with some adding fruit.
Khadaif
A bakery delight consisting of milled nuts such as walnuts and almonds layered between phyllo pastry, and soaked in sugar syrup. Khadaif is then topped off with shredded phyllo pastry.
Uzbekistan
A proud home to many bakeries such as Safia, where yummy bakes are easy to find. What struck us, though, was how familiar the options were: apple strudels, jam biscuits, croissants etc. Leaving us feeling back at square one when it came to finding traditional sweet treats on the silk road.
That said it wasn’t impossible, and the market bazaars tended to be more fruitful.
Warning: no dairy-free traditional desserts were found here.
Otherwise known as honey cake. Medovik is a rich, multi-layered dessert of honeyed sponge and cream.
Layers of filo pastry are filled with whipped egg whites, crushed nuts, raisins, honey, sugar and vanilla. Apricots may be added too.
A dense, fudge-like stick that comes in a variety of nutty and rich flavours, such as chocolate, pistachio, or sesame.
A deep-fried dough drizzled with hot honey and often served with fruit. Tasted quite nutty – so is not for the faint hearted.
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Kazakhstan
We found desserts in Kazakhstan a little more blended with other cultures. Chocolate felt more front and centre here, with cakes taking on more unique flavours than we had seen elsewhere.
Here are the somewhat more unique sweet treats we found.
A multi-layered dessert that balances fluffy cake layers with the vibrant, tangy, citrus-like flavour of sea buckthorn berries.
Mochi
We found passionfruit mochi and white chocolate pistachio mochi. Not exactly what we expected, but happy none-the-less.
We felt this deserved its own shout-out just based on how delicious the chocolate bar was. A simple chocolate bar – no bells, whistles or fillings.
Sweet treats on the silk road: our thoughts
Whilst we encountered some delicious desserts during our travels across the Silk Road, we also couldn’t help feeling disappointed by the obvious lack of range – particularly in Kyrgyzstan where we recorded zero! It felt to us that, quite simply, sweet treats are not as well sought after or desired, which left an empty feeling. Indeed our sweet tooth travel content took bit of a hit, not to mentioned any references to dairy-free items!
