All products are independently selected by our editors. If you buy something, we may earn an affiliate commission.

I must have eaten half a sheep by now. But with a defiant smile, my host, Yesen Zhakypbekova, ignores my polite refusal of a third helping from the pile of boiled meat, potatoes and doughy strips of pasta. With mutton fat dribbling down my fingers, I gnaw dry scraps of flesh from the ribs I saw hanging outside the yurt earlier that morning, and wash the musty flavour down with the never-ending supply of milky chai. It's my first taste of beshbarmak, Kazakhstan's national dish, and if this hard-to-love heap of bland meat is an indication of what's on the menu, the week ahead is not looking rosy for a picky eater like me.

Not that it matters, though, because Zhakypbekova's nomad-hospitality makes even the bitterest bite taste sweet. All morning I've watched her busying around the camp - two yurts, a blue Lada and some 600 sheep on the edge of southeast Kazakhstan's Assy Plateau - in preparation for lunch. She's fed the horse and milked the cows, as the sun tips over the undulating hills around us; she's set the animals' dung patties alight to bake taba nan, a Kazakh flatbread, for breakfast with jam and salty butter. Later, I find her in her ragtag kitchen, hunched over a pan of sizzling oil in which rhombuses of dough puff up into baursak doughnuts.

By lunchtime, the Christmas print on the vinyl cloth that covers the shin-height dastarkhān table is hardly visible under the hunks of mutton, pickles, breads and sundry bowls topped with an assortment of nuts, biscuits and Russian sweets. "It's the law of the steppe," says Zhakypbekova when we dig in. "We take care of every stranger. If you invite guests to your house, good things will happen to you."

It's a code Zhakypbekova and her husband, Erden Dautov, have honoured for more than two decades. Every summer, when the bitter cold has vaporised and the Assy Plateau's meadows fill up with dandelions and wild thistle, the couple pitch their yurts on a ridge overlooking the valley. Their cattle graze the jailau (summertime pasture) until the autumn winds roll in and they pack up again, leaving nothing but circles of flattened grass. This nomadic rinse and repeat has been the de facto way of life on Kazakhstan's steppes since the dawn of time, but it all but disappeared under the Soviets' forced collectivisation and the famine years that followed. These days, the semi-nomadic lifestyle of shepherds such as Zhakypbekova and Dautov (they retreat to their permanent farm near Almaty in winter) is all that remains of Kazakhstan's pastoral past.

Kazakh food, however, has largely stayed the same. Shaped by necessity, recipes draw on what was traditionally available on the steppe: light on vegetables and spices, heavy on dairy and meat. "Kazakhs are the second-biggest meat eaters in the world," says Dautov with a toothless grin. "At number one are wolves." The need for portable and long-lasting sustenance also resulted in lots of salting, drying and fermentation. Dairy, such as mare's milk, is soured into mouth-puckering kumis or dried into kurt, rock-hard balls of tangy cottage cheese.