I was thrilled to learn about a new market that opened up in NE Philly this past year–a market that caters to Central Asian tastes! It is called Vatan Market and it is located at 11726A Bustleton Ave, just across the street from the large NetCost market that I previously highlighted. Vatan means “homeland” in several Central Asian languages (like Uzbek, Tajik, and Uyghur, for example), and the market clearly caters to these groups. Much of the products come from neighboring countries with stronger imports to the US, notably Russia, Turkey, and Iran. It is a great mix, and there are a lot of rare items here!

As you might imagine, a key genre of food for this market is dried Central Asian fruits and nuts (i.e. items best consumed along with flatbread and tea) They have an AMAZING selection. They have all sorts of items for teatime, including special rock sugars and also several candies from Russia. I came home with some large dried raisins and dried mulberries:

The market also stocks cookware, including some nice heavy kazan pots, best for cooking delicious Central Asian rice pilaf (aka as polo, plov, palaw). They even sell charcoal cookers for the full experience!

Finally, they had an ingredient I’ve been long in search of, ever since I started getting into Karim Mahmudov’s books (I highly recommend Boris Ushumirskiy’s translation for newbies): G’o’raob (ғўраоб), a sour grape juice that has been left to ferment. It is an important ingredient in many Uzbek salad preparations, and I’ve never seen it in US markets (even at Brighton Beach’s amazing Tashkent Supermarket).

From what I understand, in Uzbekistan this was a traditional food ingredient and medicine and it is produced by harvesting unripe grapes, juicing them, and then bottling them to sit in the sun for several weeks. Today, many Uzbek observant Muslims do not use it because it may contain alcohol. The version I got above was produced in Iran, and has no alcohol. After viewing some Persian language YouTube videos it looks like the processing for this is simply bringing sour grape juice to brought to boil and then bottling it. I don’t know how different it will be to the fermented-in-the-sun one, but I’m still happy to try cooking with it!