Skardu Food: What to Eat in Baltistan, From the Kitchen That Cooks It

Baltistan was culturally Tibetan long before it was anything else, and the food still is. Balti is a Tibetic language, and the kitchen vocabulary comes with it: the noodles, the dumplings, the salted buttered tea and the roasted-grain staples all have obvious cousins in Ladakh and Tibet and almost no relatives in the Punjab. The valley sits at 2,230 metres on a thin strip of irrigated land between the Indus and a wall of granite. That geography wrote the menu. Barley and buckwheat grow where wheat struggles; apricot, walnut and mulberry trees line every irrigation channel; goats and a few cattle convert mountainside grass into meat, milk and butter. Everything else has to come up the road from Islamabad, which is why what grows here is what gets cooked here.

The first thing to clear up, because it is the most common question we get by email: the "balti" on the menu of a British curry house is not this. That dish is a Birmingham invention from the 1970s, its link to Baltistan is disputed at best, and no kitchen in Skardu cooks it or has heard of it. If you arrive expecting a steel bowl of spiced lamb, you will be confused for a week. Real Balti food is milder, starchier, nuttier and far more interesting than that.

The second thing to clear up is where it lives. Balti cooking is domestic. It is slow, it is labour-heavy — hand-pulled noodles are genuinely pulled by hand — and it was never restaurant food, because until recently there were barely any restaurants. So a visitor who walks into a place in the bazaar and asks for "traditional food of Skardu" will usually be handed a chicken karahi, because that is what sells and what can be cooked in twelve minutes. The dishes below exist, and they are superb, but you have to ask for them by name and you have to give someone notice.

Pressed apricot kernel oil is the signature. It is made in the villages from the kernels inside the stones, it is nutty and faintly bitter, and it goes on bread, into noodle paste, over marzan and into tea. Nine out of ten visitors who tell us a dish tasted "different, in a good way" are describing apricot oil without knowing it. Gilgit-Baltistan grows the bulk of Pakistan's apricots across dozens of named local cultivars — published production figures for the region conflict with each other, so we are not going to print one — and in Baltistan the fruit is dried on every flat roof in August and September. Buy dried apricots in the bazaar, not at the airport.

Barley and buckwheat do the structural work. They grow at altitudes that defeat wheat, they roast and mill well, and they are behind the breads, the porridges and marzan. Walnut does the richness: ground to a paste it is the base of prapu and a filling for giyaling, and it is the reason a bowl of plain noodles here is heavier than it looks.

Dairy ties it together. Butter in the tea, yoghurt with dumplings, and in the high villages a hard dried cheese that keeps all winter. None of this is seasoned the way food is seasoned further south. Cumin, black pepper, turmeric and dried ginger appear; serious chilli heat largely does not. Guests who find Lahori or Peshawari food too hot are usually comfortable here, and guests who want heat should say so, because our cooks will cheerfully add it and will never assume it.

Skardu's eating places divide into three. The bazaar around Yadgar Chowk and the main road has plain local restaurants doing karahi, tikka, dal and tandoor bread — good, cheap, fast, usually without English menus and usually without Balti dishes. The hotels in town run buffet or set menus aimed at tour groups, which are reliable, several times the bazaar price, and rarely more interesting. Out at the lakes, seasonal places serve trout by the water in the warm months and close when the season ends.

We deliberately do not print prices on this page. Menu prices in Skardu move with the season, with the number of coaches in town, and with what it cost to bring the supplies up the Indus road that month; any figure we published would be wrong by the following summer. What is stable is the ratio: a full plate in a bazaar restaurant costs a small fraction of a hotel dinner, and trout costs several times either. Ask our front desk what guests paid that week and you will get a current answer rather than a stale one.

Three practical things people get wrong. Hours: Skardu is not a late-night town, and kitchens in the bazaar start shutting from around nine, earlier in winter and earlier again when a wedding has emptied the street. Cash: carry it, in small notes, because card machines outside the larger hotels fail more often than they work and the bazaar ATMs run dry in peak season. Ramadan: during the fasting month daytime service in the bazaar largely stops, and the evening is extraordinary — our kitchen serves guests normally throughout, but plan your day trips around the fact that the town will not feed you at two in the afternoon.

Of the ten people who run this property, three work in the kitchen, and all of them are Balti. On an ordinary day they cook two menus in parallel: Pakistani home food that any guest will recognise — karahi, daal, roti, rice, eggs and parathas at breakfast — and the Balti dishes above, on request. That split exists because most guests arrive wanting something familiar after a long travel day, and then want the local food once they have slept.

The request that changes a trip is this one: on the evening you arrive, tell the front desk you want balay or prapu tomorrow night. That is it. The noodles are pulled by hand and the broth is a slow one, so a kitchen cannot produce either at short notice, and a guest who asks at dinner time is told no — not out of unwillingness, but out of physics. Guests who ask a day ahead eat the best meal of their week. We will also pack a breakfast for a dawn start at the dunes or the Deosai road, and send a flask of tea with it, if you ask the night before.

We are not going to claim we are the only kitchen in Skardu cooking this food, because we are not, and village kitchens in Shigar and Khaplu do several of these dishes better than any hotel does. What we can say honestly is that cooking Balti food to order for a sixteen-room house is a manageable thing, and cooking it to order for a two-hundred-room hotel is not, which is most of the reason the big places do not bother.

July to September is harvest. Apricots dry on every roof, mulberries and walnuts come in, vegetables are abundant and local, and the lake restaurants are all open. It is also the busiest and hottest stretch, and the bazaar is at its most crowded.

October is our own pick. The fruit has been dried and stored, the valley is gold, the crowds have gone, and the kitchen's vegetables are at their best before the road supply narrows. Late September and October is the fortnight we tell returning guests to book.

November to February is when the winter food exists at all. Marzan and harissa belong to these months, meat is more central, and dinner is heavier for an obvious reason. It is also when the road supply is thinnest, so fresh vegetable choice narrows and the menu simplifies. The valley is at its most beautiful and its most austere, and that includes the table.

April and May are blossom and early greens. Apricot blossom, which most visitors call cherry blossom, comes first; the fruit itself is months away. If you are coming in spring, come for the orchards rather than for the harvest.