Siberian Cuisine

We can not talk about Siberia without saying some words about Siberian cuisine. It differs from all the others throughout the world. The Siberian cuisine has ancient origin and old culinary traditions. Siberian dishes spread throughout the country only after construction of railway in Siberia.

Genuine Siberian cuisine is a combination of meat, game, fish and unique taiga seasoning. One of the popular Siberian dishes is pelmeni dumplings, which are famous all over Russia. Most of the Siberians prepare plenty of pelmeni dumplings at once and put already frozen dumplings into linen sacks. Whenever you want, you can just put them into the boiling water and in several minutes, the tasty dish is ready.

Due to the fact that Northwestern Siberia is plenty of rivers and lakes, fish is a main part of the typical cuisine. There are about 50,000 rivers in the territory of the Yamalo-Nenets district. All of them belong to the Kara sea basin: Taz, Pur, Nadym, Messoyakha. There are also 300,000 lakes here with Piakuto, Yaroto, Neito and Nembuto as the main ones. The rivers' basins supply more than a half of all Russian fish, being  sturgeon, Siberian white salmon (nelma), whitefish (muksun) and arctic cisco (omul) the best kwon fishes.

People of Northern Russia know that eating food raw, as it is, or better to say as it was in nature, can be very beneficial to their health. The only problem is that the only food available during long polar nights in raw state in these lands is meat and blood - the flesh of the freshly killed deers they breed. So, they eat it as it is - raw and uncooked. People say, that this is the only source of vitamins, especially vitamin C for them, and due to this habit they maintain to survive in severe Northern climates for hundreds of years.

Stroganina, a kind of Siberian sashimi, is the crown of the Siberian cuisine treasures. It is thin, crisp slices of fresh frozen fish seasoned only with salt and pepper and traditionally served with vodka.