The Buryat cuisine is one of the attractions of Lake Baikal, so it is a must for everybody on a Baikal tour to try national Buryat dishes. Recipes of Buryat cuisine are delicious and unusual, which makes them attractive for tourists. Thus, it is no wonder that gastronomic tours in the Republic of Buryatia are popular nowadays. Read more articles about Lake Baikal
1. Buryat Meat Pies - Boosy
The most popular dish of Buryat cuisine is boosy, or posy, which are pies stuffed with finely chopped horse meat, beef or lamb mixed with onions and visceral fat. The main condition for delicious boosy is that mincemeat must be juicy. The dough is same like for home-made noodles, but these traditional pies are steamed.
2. Buryat Homemade Cheese - Huruud
Dairy products and dishes made of them take a special place in the Buryat cuisine: the Buryats prepare drinks, second and first courses and even bread from milk. Every celebration in Buryatia starts with dairy treats: just like the Russians greet guests with bread and salt, so the Buryats do with milk or other dairy foods. This custom is named sagaalha in their language.

Huruud is pressed dried homemade cheese, which is eaten by locals like bread. It is prepared in the following way: fresh whole milk is kept in a cool place for two to three days to ferment. Thick sour cream is taken from the surface and the remaining sour milk is used to make cottage cheese, a tasty and nutritious lasting food. It is simmered for five minutes. The resulting cottage cheese mass is filtered, then spread out into flat cakes, pressed with wooden planks and exposed to sunlight for drying.
10 liters of milk yield about 2 kg of sour cream and 3-4 kg of huruud cheese.
3. Buryat Dry Curd – Ayrhan
Whole milk is brought to boiling, cooled down to 25-30 degrees, fermented with adding sour milk into it and kept in a warm place. The resulting curd is gently put into several layers of gauze and let the buttermilk drain. Then it is wrapped in gauze and put under the press for 5-6 hours. The cottage cheese obtained is dried in a hot place (at the temperature of +35 to + 40 Centigrade). The product lasts for a long time, like a month or even more.
4. Buryat Milk Skin – Urme 
This is one of the most popular traditional Buryat dairy delicacies. The technology of making urme is quite simple. Fresh milk (preferably in a cast-iron boiler) is boiled on low heat for twenty to thirty minutes, until foam appears. Then it is kept in a cool place for 12 hours. After a while, a 1.5 to 2 cm thick layer of foam is condensed on the top of the milk. The thickness of this milk skin depends on the fat content of the milk. It is carefully taken off with a birch spatula and dried, if it is a warm season. In wintertime it is frozen. Dried or frozen milk skins are cut like wafers and served. 
10 liters of milk yiels only one kilogram of urme. And where does the remaining milk go? It is used for making a very popular and widespread cultured dairy drink called Tarag.

Classic Trans Siberian tour

5. Buryat Noodle Soup – Shulep 
Shulep is another national staple dish of the Buryat people. It is noodle soup with mutton cut into strips. The noodles are traditionally homemade: the egg-based dough is rolled into a 2-3 mm thick layer and cut long. Then the noodles are added into boiling mutton broth and cooked for 15-20 minutes. Salt, pepper, and bay leaf are added to taste. 

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