Dograma, ishlekli, chorba, and the melons worth timing a trip around.
Turkmen cooking is food of the desert and the steppe: a lot of meat, few greens, bread at every meal and tea without limit. It shares roots with Uzbek and Kazakh cooking, but several dishes exist only here.
**Dograma.** The most Turkmen thing there is. Boiled mutton, onion and flatbread, torn into small pieces by hand and covered with broth. A knife is not used, on principle — the taste is held to come out differently. It is usually made for holidays and for a crowd.
**Ishlekli.** A large meat and onion pie baked in sand under coals. It stays juicy inside and comes out with a crust. It belongs to Balkan province, and that is where it is best.
**Chorba.** A thick mutton and vegetable soup, plain and everyday. Lunch usually begins with it.
Then **gutap**, flatbreads fried with herbs, pumpkin or meat, and **shashlik**, grilled here over saxaul wood: the smoke has a smell of its own and the meat is not what you get over shop charcoal.
People drink green tea, a great deal of it, all day, including in the heat — the local view is that hot tea works better than cold water when it is forty degrees, and after a week here it is hard to argue.
And the thing worth timing a trip around: **melons**. The Turkmen melon is a point of national pride with a holiday of its own in August. The season is late summer into early autumn, and what is on the market then bears little relation to what the word means elsewhere.