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Traditional food of Azerbaijan: 13 dishes to know

Azerbaijani food is built on lamb, rice, fresh herbs and saffron, with Caspian fish, yogurt and dried fruit. Soups are thick enough to be a meal, meat is grilled on skewers or slow-cooked in clay pots, and rice is steamed apart from what goes with it. The most emblematic dishes are plov, dolma, the herb and yogurt soup dovga and the thin stuffed flatbread qutab.

Updated 2026-10-125 min read

What Azerbaijani food is built on

Azerbaijan sits between Europe and Asia on the Caspian Sea, and its cooking grew out of pastoral farming: a diet rich in produce, milk and meat, mostly lamb, beef and poultry, with fish from the Caspian and the Kura and Aras rivers. Turkic, Iranian and Caucasian traditions all left their mark, and many dishes are shared with Armenia, Georgia and Iran under related names.

Herbs are everywhere: mint, coriander, dill, basil, tarragon and watercress go on the table with almost every main dish. Saffron, grown on the Absheron Peninsula, is used in more than 50 national dishes, and sumac, dried fruit, chestnuts and walnuts give many dishes a sweet and sour edge.

A traditional meal has three courses. It opens with goy, a plate of fresh green leaves, with chorek bread, white cheese, qatiq yogurt and turshu pickles; soups, meat and plov follow. Copper pots and plates are still used to cook and serve food. The two dishes at the centre of the table are covered in depth in our article on the national dish of Azerbaijan.

Rice, stuffed dishes and kebabs

Plov — Saffron rice steamed over a qazmaq crust, served with gara, meat, chestnuts or dried fruit cooked separately, and fresh herbs on their own platter; the rice is never mixed with the rest, even while eating. Azerbaijani cuisine counts more than 200 kinds of plov, named after what goes with the rice. A household traditionally cooks plov for visiting guests and serves it with ayran or black tea with lemon.
Dolma — Minced meat, onion, rice and spices wrapped in grape or cabbage leaves or stuffed into aubergines, tomatoes and peppers. It is the dish most often named as Azerbaijan's national dish, and UNESCO inscribed the country's dolma making and sharing tradition in 2017. Armenia also claims it, as tolma.
Lula kebab — Minced mutton kneaded with grated onion, tail fat, salt and pepper, pressed around wide skewers and grilled over a charcoal mangal for 10 to 15 minutes. It is served in lavash, often with a sprinkling of sumac.
Sturgeon shashlik — Caspian sturgeon cut into chunks, skewered and grilled, then served with narsharab, a tart pomegranate sauce. Lamb, chicken and other fish are grilled the same way, and kebabs are the usual second course of a meal.

Soups that make a meal

Azerbaijani soups are thick, with more solid ingredients than broth. Often the broth is drunk first and the meat, chickpeas and vegetables are eaten afterwards with bread, so one pot serves as two courses.

Piti — Mutton, tail fat, chickpeas and dried cherry plums cooked slowly in an individual clay crock, with saffron water and potatoes added near the end. It is eaten in two steps: bread is crumbled into a bowl and the broth poured over, then the meat and vegetables follow. In Shaki, piti is made with chestnuts.
Dovga — A yogurt soup thickened with rice and chickpeas and loaded with coriander, dill, mint and spinach. The egg and flour are whisked into the yogurt cold and the pot is stirred without stopping as it heats, so the yogurt never splits. It is served warm in winter and chilled in summer, and is a fixture at weddings.
Kufta bozbash — A broth of lamb with chickpeas and potatoes in which each serving holds one large meatball of minced lamb, about the size of an apple. The name may come from boz, "grey", and bash, "head", after the look of the meatball.
Dushbara — A clear lamb broth filled with tiny meat dumplings, so small that a soup spoon should hold eight to ten of them. A common Azerbaijani joke derives the name from düş bəri, "fall here", as in fill the spoon.

Breads, pastries and tea

Qutab — Half-moons of very thin unleavened dough filled with minced lamb, greens or pumpkin, cooked briefly on both sides on a convex saj griddle and brushed with butter. They are served with yogurt and sumac as a snack or starter.
Lavash and tandir bread — Lavash, a thin flatbread, and thicker tandir bread are the everyday breads of Azerbaijan, both baked against the walls of a clay tandir oven. In 2016 UNESCO inscribed the culture of making and sharing lavash and other flatbreads in Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkey.
Pakhlava and Shaki halva — Pakhlava is a layered pastry of thin dough and chopped nuts, soaked in syrup. Shaki halva, from the north-western town of Shaki, layers nuts between nets of thin rice-flour threads in syrup. Sweets like these are usually bought from a pastry shop for weddings, wakes and holidays.
Shekerbura — A half-moon pastry filled with ground almonds, hazelnuts or walnuts, sugar and cardamom, its edge pinched into a pattern with tweezers called maggash. It is one of the three pastries of Novruz, the spring new year, with shorgoghal and pakhlava, and relatives and neighbours often gather to make them together.
Black tea — Brewed in a samovar and drunk after the meal, black tea is also how guests are welcomed. It comes with murabba, whole-fruit preserves eaten from a spoon or stirred into the glass as a sweetener.

Regional food in Azerbaijan

Shaki, in the north-west, is known for its piti with chestnuts and for its sweets, above all Shaki halva. Shamakhi has its own qutab, Ganja and Nakhchivan bake larger kete, and the village of Jorat makes small qutab filled with camel meat. On the Caspian coast and around Baku, fish such as sturgeon, kutum and Caspian salmon is grilled, stuffed or cooked into plov, and Caspian caviar is a prized ingredient.

Azerbaijan shares many dishes with its neighbours: compare dolma with tolma in the traditional food of Armenia, and piti and bozbash with the abgoosht stews in the traditional food of Iran.

Cook Azerbaijani food at home

Plov, dovga and qutab have full recipes with ingredients and step-by-step methods on our page about the food of Azerbaijan. For the neighbouring kitchens of Georgia and Armenia, see our guide to Caucasian food.

The recipes

Questions people ask

What is the most popular food in Azerbaijan?

Plov and dolma. Plov, saffron rice served with separate meat or fruit, is cooked for guests and celebrations, and dolma is the dish most often named as the national dish. Kebabs, qutab and soups such as piti and dovga are everyday favourites.

What do people in Azerbaijan eat for breakfast?

A dairy-heavy spread: butter, white cheeses and cream, honey, tandir bread and eggs, sometimes cooked as kuku, a baked herb omelette. Black tea accompanies it.

Is Azerbaijani food spicy?

Not hot. It is seasoned with saffron, sumac, black pepper, dried fruit and large amounts of fresh herbs rather than chilli.

Is dolma Azerbaijani or Armenian?

Both countries claim it. UNESCO inscribed Azerbaijan's dolma making and sharing tradition in 2017, while Armenia counts tolma as its own; the name itself comes from a Turkic word meaning "stuffed".

What is dovga?

Dovga is an Azerbaijani yogurt soup with rice, chickpeas and fresh herbs such as coriander, dill, mint and spinach, served warm in winter and cold in summer.

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