Air-cured Armenian beef encrusted in a bold paste of fenugreek, garlic, and dried chilies — sliced thin and eaten with eggs or bread, its aroma filling every room it enters.
Basturma is the kind of food that announces itself. The curing paste — called chemen, a blend of fenugreek, garlic, allspice, cumin, and hot and sweet paprika — has an aroma so assertive that basturma eaters are advised to plan their social engagements around it. It seeps from the skin for hours after eating. People either love it absolutely or avoid it completely. There is no middle ground. Armenian basturma has been made since at least the medieval period, when it was the preservation method of choice for beef in the highlands of Anatolia and the Caucasus. The technique is simple but slow: beef is salted, pressed under weights to remove moisture, then coated thickly in the chemen paste and hung to dry in a cool ventilated space for weeks. The result is a dry-cured beef of intense, complex, deeply savory flavor, sliced thin as paper and eaten with eggs fried in butter, with fresh bread and white cheese, or as part of a meze table. In Armenian households, making basturma at home is a winter project — the cold dry air of the Armenian highlands (replicated in cool pantries or refrigerators) being ideal for the curing process.
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