Turkmenistan

Turkmen cooking is desert and Silk Road food — built on mutton, rice and bread, and eaten slowly with green tea always on the go. The centrepiece is palaw, the local plov: rice cooked down with mutton, onion and carrot until it's rich and golden. On feast days it shares the table with dograma, often called the national dish — flaky bread torn by hand into boiled meat and onion, then flooded with hot broth. Bread itself is close to sacred here: round churek baked in a clay tandyr, offered to guests, torn rather than cut, and never set down upside-down.

What Turkmenistan is proudest of, though, is its melons — gara and vaharman varieties reckoned among the sweetest anywhere, honoured every August with a national Melon Day. Meals begin with a bowl of chorba, the spiced mutton soup, and run on gok chai, green tea poured continuously and often steeped with dried fruit or mint; out in the desert, herders still drink chal, a fizzy fermented camel's milk. To see it all in one place, walk the vast Altyn Asyr bazaar outside Ashgabat, where melons, spices and fresh tandyr bread are piled high.