Afghanistan

A Sense of Place

Afghanistan is argued by its flanks. Three food worlds sit on the three sides of the Hindu Kush, and each is claimed by a different people, and the capital in the middle eats from all of them. What holds them together is dry. Wheat where there is water to irrigate it, sheep and goats where there is not, orchards in the valleys, and a long winter that every kitchen has to be ready for in October.

Kabul and its orchards

The provincial profile the Afghan agency Pajhwok keeps puts about 90 per cent of Kabul province's economy on agriculture and livestock: wheat, barley and beans as the main crops, grapes, apples, apricots and peaches sent to other provinces and abroad, and the province's farming described as 72 per cent fruit, 17 per cent legumes, 10 per cent vegetables, as the profile gives it and as nobody we read cross-checked. The Ministry of Agriculture's Badambagh farm in the city selects apricots and trials orchards. The everyday table is bread from a clay tandoor. In 2024 the Kabul paper Hasht-e Subh reported a 50 kilo sack of Kazakh flour at 1,620 afghani and Afghan flour at 1,480, an ordinary naan at about 10 afghani and a long one at 20, and residents complaining that the loaves came 30 to 40 grams under the set weight.

The Pashtun south and east

Kandahar, Helmand, Nangarhar, Khost, Paktia, the Khyber side. Sheep and goat country, where meat is put down for winter. Landi, mutton salted and air dried in the autumn, is the dish the Dari press ties to Ghazni, Kandahar, Paktika and Zabul and to Paktia, Logar and Khost, "and other cold areas". Beyond landi, chapli and mantu, no source we reached describes the ecology or the trade of Helmand, Nangarhar or Khost, and the Pashto language searches that should have found them found folk verse and proverbs instead. The Pashtun table here is told through Dari, Pakistani and English sources.

Herat and the Persian west

The Hari Rud valley and its irrigated plain, on the Iranian frontier. Herat is Afghanistan's saffron province by every source we read. A regional agriculture director told the Awa agency in September 2014 that Herat then had 750 hectares under saffron, had produced 3,000 kilos the year before, grew about 95 per cent of the country's crop, had 14 companies and 25 cooperatives, and was sending corms to 23 other provinces; he also said farmers had not wanted it at first and the government had pushed it as an alternative to poppy. A later government page, undated where we saw it, gives 7,557 hectares nationally and 19,469 kilos, about 7,000 of those hectares in Herat. We give both figures with their dates and do not draw the line between them. Herati cooking, in the lists Afghan writers give, is rice with winter-dried mutton, rice with qurut, aubergine finished with qurut and dried mint, a whole sheep in the tandoor, and a sun-dried tomato dough that one Herati writer says is Herat's alone.

The Hazara centre

Bamyan, Daykundi and the Hazarajat, the high middle of the country. The food is meat and dairy with a lot of oil, doogh as the drink and tea loved, and rice less often because of the climate. That picture comes from a Hazara writer's blog of 2014 and a Persian language encyclopaedia entry, and from a Hazara cook, Tayyaba Batool, filmed in her kitchen in Quetta, across the border in Pakistan, which the film itself says is Quetta's Hazara table and not Hazarajat's. The high altitude barley and potato economy that the Hazarajat must have was in no source we read.

The north

Mazar-i-Sharif and Balkh on the Amu plain, Jawzjan and Faryab to the west, Kunduz and Badakhshan to the east. Tajiks, Uzbeks, Turkmen, Pashtun settlers and Hazara on one plain. The Mazar spring is the Gul-e Surkh, the red tulip season, when the city fills for the flag raising at the Blue Mosque at Nowruz. What we can give the north by name is one dish with a living cook, the Turkmen pie ashliki. The Uzbek bread and the Uzbek table of Afghanistan were in nothing we reached; AS-58, Uzbekistan, has them across the river.

A table of peoples, logic and dishes

The History in Layers

The palaw and where it is from

Qabili palaw is often called the national dish. Durkhanai Ayubi calls it that on the Parwana recipe page, Herat's Doorbin magazine files it so, and Australian and American food writing repeats it. It is a description that writers reach for, not a decree. Where it is from is argued. The Persian language encyclopaedia entry, resting on the British anthropologist Magnus Marsden's 2021 article and on Helen Saberi's book, leans to the north, near the Uzbek border, and adds that the dish entered elite Persian cooking as Afghan pulao in the late reign of Fath Ali Shah, during the contest over Herat, when Iranians learned it from Afghans. Iranian outlets say the north without a source and disagree among themselves on Mazar, Balkh, Herat, Khorasan or Kabul. English Wikipedia adds a first written recipe in Ali Bavarchi's manuscript of 1521, which nobody we read has opened. No Afghan source we reached addresses the question. The name is Qabili or Qabuli in Dari; Kabuli is how the world outside says it.

The kebab across the Durand Line

Chapli is Pashtun, on both sides of a border drawn in 1893. The Pakistani paper Dawn, in a 2014 column by Bisma Tirmizi, credits it to the province then called the North-West Frontier and to eastern Afghanistan and calls it "a purely Pakhtun take on the kabab". Peshawar and Takht Bhai dispute it between themselves, and that dispute, with named chefs on each side, lives in AS-14, Sindh and the Frontier, which is chapli's home. Kabul fries it by the kilo in the street; Iranian news sites run the videos. No Afghan source we read says Kabul's chapli differs from Peshawar's, so it is one kebab family here.

Winter, and the price of a sheep

Landi is the history of a hard winter made into a method. A cultural activist, Alem Gul Sahar, told Radio Azadi in December 2024 that it grew from winters before refrigeration. The same report priced a sheep or goat for landi at 13,000 to 14,000 afghani that year, and quoted two men who could not make it: Faisal, from Paktia, and Samim, from Logar.

Nowruz and Eid

The year turns at Nowruz with haft mewa, seven dried fruits and nuts soaked in their own sweet water, and with samanak, the sprouted wheat pudding that women cook overnight in groups, singing. Whether Afghans also keep the Iranian haft sin is argued between an Iranian magazine, which says haft mewa stands in its place, and an Afghan government page whose title names haft sin beside samanak. Radio Azadi's Eid piece of June 2017 has Kabul families saving for the day, tables of dried and fresh fruit, sweets, cakes and kulcha, and the plain difference between what rich and poor households could set out.

The table that left

Durkhanai Ayubi was born in 1985. Her family was displaced by the Soviet war, reached Australia through Pakistan in 1987 and Adelaide in 1989. They opened Parwana in Adelaide in 2009 and Kutchi Deli Parwana in 2014; her book, Parwana: Recipes and Stories from an Afghan Kitchen, came out in 2020 and won the Art of Eating Prize and a Guild of Food Writers award in 2021, and the restaurant took the 2024 Gourmet Traveller award for outstanding contribution to hospitality. She told SBS that visitors arrive knowing "all I ever knew about Afghanistan was war", and that the country has been a global centre of diversity for food. Hers is the clearest restaurant voice we found, and it is in Adelaide. In Fremont, California, Aziz Omar says he opened his first Afghan restaurant in 1993, and the Afghan community that moved there from Queens built a row of kebab houses and bakeries whose bread sells out; the names come from one 2018 article and we give them as indicative. No modernist Afghan restaurant was found anywhere, in Kabul, London, Fremont or Adelaide. Restaurant level here means a family doing the tradition properly.

Kabul since 2021

What we can say with a date: NPR reported on 1 June 2023 that a pop-up restaurant called Banowan-e-Afghan had opened in Kabul in March of that year, staffed almost entirely by women and girls, and that the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice had visited and objected to women working alongside two male cooks. Dari language reports from 2024 and 2025 on Kabul's women's restaurant and Herat's closed women's cafes exist and were not read with their dates. Everything else about the Taliban era and the table waits on a dated source.

The Flavour Arsenal

Each entry says who says it.

Saffron

Herat's crop, above. Radio Azadi reported on 30 April 2026 that Herat saffron had taken the International Taste Institute's award for the tenth time, that exports had risen 20 to 25 per cent in two months by the National Saffron Union's director Farhad Omid, and that Iranian officials alleged Afghan traders resell Iranian saffron under Afghan names, which the union denied. An award is an award. No source we read describes saffron in a Herati dish.

Qurut

Dried yoghurt, pebble-like balls, reconstituted by rubbing with water in a clay bowl. In Herat it goes into kichri qurut, the rice of the first day of winter, and over black aubergine with dried mint; the Hazara writer lists it too. Shared between Herat and the Hazarajat, owned by neither on this evidence.

Chakah and mast

Mast is yoghurt and the base of every sauce and dip; chakah is yoghurt drained to the texture of cream cheese. Both from SBS's ingredient guide and from Parwana's menu.

Gandana

A garlic chive, "a cross between a chive and a leek", the filling of ashak and bolani. One machine translation we met rendered it as wheat sprouts. It is the allium. Wheat sprouts are for samanak.

Dried mint, garlic, tomato and the lentil sauce

The dressing of mantu: yoghurt with garlic, a sauce of split lentils with onion, garlic and tomato, dried mint over the top.

Raisins, carrot, almond and pistachio

The palaw's crown. Ayubi fries julienned carrot and sultanas in oil with sugar and cardamom; SBS names green raisins, black mulberries, dried plums, almonds, pistachios, pine nuts and walnuts as the dried fruit and nut shelf of the country, in cooking and as offerings.

Tail fat and the winter meat

Dumba, the sheep's tail fat, in the Kabul chapli list; landi, the salted dried mutton of the south and east, which the Hazara call qadid and Herat calls land, and which Radio Azadi also hears as lendi, katra and qaq.

The spice

Cumin and cardamom, and nothing else, in Ayubi's palaw, with cardamom again in the topping. Coriander seed, cumin, turmeric and a little cinnamon in the kofta of the recipe sites. Coriander seed and anardana, dried pomegranate seed, in the chapli of the Pakistani press. The Afghan table is aromatic and it is not hot.

Sella basmati

Parboiled basmati is the rice of the diaspora recipe and of the Southall shops. SBS gives aged basmati or sella for separate grains; nobody we read describes sella production in Afghanistan.

The fat

Sunflower oil in Ayubi's kitchen. Tail fat in the chapli. An Iranian recipe uses sesame oil. No Afghan cook told us the traditional fat.

The Technique Ladder

Afghan restaurant cooking, where it exists, is home cooking done by someone who has done it ten thousand times, and the ancestor of every restaurant step is in a village kitchen. Five rungs, each with the mechanism stated.

Rung 1. Soak, parboil, and steam the rice under a cloth

Ayubi's palaw: sella basmati soaked two to three hours, boiled in salted water six to eight minutes until the grain has doubled in length, drained, layered with the meat and its stock and the spice, and steamed on low for twenty minutes. Persian language recipe sites steam for forty five minutes to an hour, which is two or three times longer, and the difference is the rice: raw grain and the Iranian pot against parboiled grain and a pressure cooked stock. We give both. SBS adds the sutak, the cotton cloth under the lid.

Why it works: parboiling has already set the starch in a sella grain, so a short boil opens it without the grains clinging; the steam finishes the inside; the cloth takes the water that condenses on the lid and would otherwise fall back and glue the top layer. Separate grains are the whole test of a palaw.

Rung 2. Fry the crown apart

The carrot and the raisin are fried separately from the rice, in oil, with sugar and cardamom: carrot four to five minutes until soft, sultanas three minutes until they swell. Then they go over the finished rice, or are folded through, with slivered almonds and pistachios.

Why it works: carrot has sugar of its own and the added sugar brings it to a caramel in the fat without burning; a raisin fried briefly swells and goes glossy and would turn leathery in the steam. Fried apart, each keeps its texture against the rice.

Rung 3. Steam the dumpling, do not boil it

Mantu is steamed in tiered vessels, the Hazara writer says steamed rather than boiled, and the recipe sites steam for twenty minutes. Ashak is the leek dumpling under yoghurt and dried mint.

Why it works: steam cooks the thin wrapper through at the boiling point without soaking it, so a thin skin holds a wet filling; the meat inside cooks in its own juice. A boiled mantu is a soft one.

Rung 4. Salt, and let the cold dry it

Landi is sheep meat cut in pieces, salted, and set to dry in the open air for seven to eight days, keeping it from frost, in late October or November, then stored for winter and cooked with rice, in soup, or on a skewer. The Hazara qadid takes four to six weeks. Ghulor tursh in Herat is the same idea applied to a dough: tomato and spice worked to a paste, shaped small, dried in the sun for two or three days, crumbled, and cooked in boiling water with fried onion and garlic.

Why it works: salt draws water out of the muscle and holds what is left; the cold, dry air of an Afghan autumn takes the rest before anything can grow in it. Dry a dough the same way and you have a stock cube the sun made.

Rung 5. Work the milk into something that keeps

Mast is set; chakah is mast strained through cloth until it is thick; qurut is yoghurt dried to a stone and rubbed back to a sauce with water in a clay bowl. Three states of one milk.

Why it works: straining removes whey and concentrates the curd; drying removes nearly all the water, and the lactic acid that soured the milk is what keeps the dried ball from spoiling. The clay bowl's rough side is the grater.

Part Three

The Ferment and Preserve Bench

1. Landi

Sheep meat cut in pieces, salted, and dried in the open air, seven or eight days by Radio Azadi's 2024 account, kept from frost, made in late October or November and stored for the winter. The Hazara qadid takes four to six weeks. No source gives the salt by weight. It is cooked with rice, in soup, or grilled on a skewer. The Pashto word is the same on the page as the word for a two line folk poem, landai, and the two have nothing to do with each other.

2. Qurut

Yoghurt salted, drained and dried to hard balls, reconstituted by rubbing with water in a rough clay bowl. The method with its salt and its days reached us from nobody inside the tradition. Dried labneh is the nearest thing in Britain and is not the same.

3. Chakah

Yoghurt hung in cloth until it is thick as cream cheese. The base of the dips, and the thing to spread under mantu so the sauce stays on the plate.

Sourcing in Britain

Verified October 2026, from retailer and restaurant pages, which show that a thing is sold and nothing more. No shop in Wembley, Harrow, Ealing, Edgware, Birmingham or Manchester was checked in person; the names below come from listings. Tell us yours.

Bread, mantu and ashak, made. Watan Bakery at 30 High Street, Southall, bakes naan-e Afghani in a tandoor, the long leaf shaped loaf scored down the middle, and sells handmade mantu and ashak. Southall Afghan Bakery at 2 The Broadway is the other. An Afghan dried fruit shop trades in Southall too.

Shops and mail order. Bakhtar Market in Hounslow, with mail order and light mulberries listed; AFG Bazaar on Camp Lane, Birmingham; 24Shopping in Wembley; Afghan Market and Safa Bakery and Halal Market online. Aahu Barah's Kabul Basmati sella rice is the bag the listings name.

What to look for. Sella basmati for the palaw. Qurut, green raisins, black mulberries, dried apricots and senjed for haft mewa, chana dal for the mantu sauce, dried mint, and fresh gandana where a shop has it; chives and leek together are the stand-in. Saffron from Herat is not confirmed in any British shop, so a bag that says Herat is a claim to check.

Where to eat it. Afghan Kitchen on Islington Green; Ariana II on Kilburn High Road; Balkh on Kenton Road and Qaboli on Station Road in Harrow; Kabul Korner on the High Road in Harrow for street food; Watan Restaurant and Shahre Naw in Southall. These are places where Afghan cooking can be eaten and not a ranking; no Afghan writer has reviewed them that we found.

Kit. A pressure cooker for the stock and a heavy pot with a cloth for the rice are the real kit. A tiered steamer for mantu. The dehydrator stands in for the Herat sun and for the drying of qurut once a method is found. The Big Green Egg with a stone approximates the tandoor for naan and bolani; nobody has tested it for this food.

The ingredients that decide great from grim, in order. The rice, sella and soaked. A stock that tastes of lamb. Carrot and raisin fried apart. Gandana and not spinach. Dried mint rubbed fresh. Yoghurt strained.

Voices and Sources

From inside the tradition

• Durkhanai Ayubi, Adelaide, Parwana: the only tested recipe with quantities and times here, and the clearest restaurant voice, speaking from Australia.
• Mohammad Husain Nikkhah, writing for Hasht-e Subh in 2019, on ghulor tursh and Herat.
• Doorbin magazine, Herat, February 2018, whose list of Herati dishes is the only one we have, and which names no author.
• Radio Azadi's Dari service: landi in 2017 and December 2024, with Alem Gul Sahar, Faisal and Samim named; ashliki in spring 2024, with Muhammad Babar and Maneeza; Herat saffron in April 2026, with Farhad Omid; Eid in Kabul in 2017.
• The Awa agency, September 2014, with Herat's agriculture director on saffron.
• A Hazara writer, blogging in April 2014, who names no name and writes partly from a Quetta frame; and Tayyaba Batool, a Hazara cook filmed in Quetta, whose kitchen is Quetta's and not Bamyan's, as the film says.
• Humaira Ghilzai, California, whose blog Afghan Culture Unveiled is a usable record of an Afghan American kitchen and is no longer updated.
• Aziz Omar of De Afghanan, Fremont, by one 2018 account.
• Bisma Tirmizi, Dawn, 2014, on chapli, a Pakistani voice for a Pashtun dish.
• Helen Saberi, Afghan Food and Cookery, who lived in Kabul and is Western born; her book is cited by others here and was not read by us. Magnus Marsden, whose 2021 article is behind the northern origin claim and is behind a paywall.

The gaps, named

Pashto was not reached. Three Pashto searches returned verse, proverbs and a general article on meat. The Pashtun table, the biggest in the country, is described here through Dari, Pakistani and English sources. No Afghan academic, no FAO survey, no cookbook text and no chef inside Afghanistan was read. The Hazarajat rests on one unnamed writer and a cook in Quetta; the Uzbek table of the north is not here at all; Nuristan and the Baloch south were never searched. The quantities for mantu, ashak, bolani, kofta and naan exist in these briefs only on Iranian recipe sites. The first work of the next pass is Pashto, the Parwana book, and a Hazara source from Bamyan.

Claims we checked and would not make

• That qabili palaw is the national dish, as fact. It is often called that, by Ayubi, by Doorbin and by Western food media, and the phrase is theirs.
• Where qabili palaw is from. The Persian language account, resting on Marsden's hedge and on Saberi, leans north; Iranian outlets assert the north without a source and disagree with each other; the 1521 Bavarchi recipe is relayed by English Wikipedia and unread; no Afghan source we reached addresses it.
• That a Kabul style chapli exists, distinct from Peshawar's, or that chapli is Afghan or Pakistani in origin. Both exist; the dispute is in AS-14.
• That "korma e lawand" is a dish. The name could not be traced anywhere; landi is the word, and landi palaw the dish.
• That sheer yakh is old, or has Kabul, Mazar and Herat forms; that shor nakhod, naan-e Uzbeki or the Uzbek table of Afghanistan are as any source describes them. Nothing sourced.
• That there is a Hazara mantu, or that dograh, gul-e chai and keshmish are Hazara dishes; that mantu, ashak or bolani belong to one people. Shared, with no owner.
• That ashak is fried, or that gandana is wheat sprouts. Two errors in secondary summaries.
• That haft mewa is Mazar's, or that Afghans do not keep haft sin. No source for the first; an Iranian magazine against an Afghan government title for the second.
• That ghulor tursh is unique to Herat, as fact; a Herati writer says so.
• That ashliki comes from nomad tents, as history; one historian's claim in one report.
• The Herat saffron figures as one trend, or Herat saffron as the best in the world. Awa, 2014: 750 hectares. A later undated government page: about 7,000. The award is an award, and Iran disputes what is in the bag.
• Any Timurid or Safavid Herat cookery, any Herati grape and raisin culture, any barley or potato dish of the Hazarajat. Nothing reached.
• That sugar is caramelised with the meat and rice in the tradition's palaw; Ayubi's two teaspoons go in the carrot only. That veal has a place in it.
• Quantities for mantu, ashak, bolani, kofta, naan, qurut, qorma, or the traditional fat. The only numbers exist on Iranian recipe sites and in a Quetta kitchen, and the palaw's are the only tested Afghan ones.
• Any effect of the Taliban's return on restaurants, women cooks or the table beyond NPR's report of 1 June 2023; the Dari pieces of 2024 and 2025 on Kabul's women's restaurant and Herat's closed cafes were not read with their dates. Any claim about the opium economy beyond an official's 2014 statement that saffron was promoted as a poppy alternative.
• Afghan fine dining, Michelin or awards in London, Fremont or Kabul; the Afghan Food Project, which the searches did not find; and a diagnosis of why diaspora Afghan restaurants disappoint, which no source supports.
• Any British shop, brand or legal status for an Afghan ingredient as verified, and the London restaurants as recommended.
• That the Pajhwok percentages for Kabul's farming, or the 2024 bread prices, were cross-checked. They are as reported.
• That the Iranian press videos of Kabul street food are Afghan accounts. They are Iranian re-presentations of Afghan footage.

Sources and review

Researched

Researched from 55 sources in the brief

Where this comes from

6 research briefs on file for this volume, researched to the rules on How we research. Published 13 October 2026. Last changed 22 October 2026.

The brief's own account of its sources

Counts. Roughly 22 sources used. Local or in-tradition: 6 Afghan press or broadcast items (3 Radio Azadi Dari pieces: landi twice, Eid once; the Pajhwok provincial profile; 8am.media; the gov.af agricultural note, the last two seen only as search snippets), plus 1 Afghan-heritage cook (Parwana, Adelaide). Persian-world but not Afghan: about 8 (Persian Wikipedia, Iranian press video items, Persian recipe sites). Pakistani: 1 (Dawn, plus AS-14's reused sources). Western secondary: 3 (English Wikipedia, Broadsheet, Western recipe sites seen in snippets only).