Qurut
Hard, salty balls of dried strained yoghurt or sour milk, eaten across Central Asia.
Also: kurt, құрт, qurt, курут, kurut
Qurut, also kurt or kurut, is the dried dairy food of the Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Turkmen, Tajik and Afghan peoples. Sour milk, yoghurt or ayran is strained in a cloth bag until thick, salted, rolled by hand into small balls or pressed into shapes, and dried in the sun and wind until rock-hard and chalky. Qurut keeps for many months without refrigeration, so it has long been carried by herders and travellers. It is sucked or nibbled as a sour, salty snack, crumbled and dissolved into soups, or, in Tajikistan, soaked and poured over bread as the dish qurutob. Smoked and sweetened versions exist. It is close to Iranian kashk and Mongolian aaruul.