Samarkand Non

A heavier, glossier loaf

Non, the round leavened bread of Uzbekistan, comes in many regional styles, and the Samarkand version stands out for its weight. AramcoWorld’s writer Eric Hansen found it darker, heavier, larger and more filling than the bread of Tashkent, dense in texture and finished with a light sheen of oil. Middle East Eye described it as much thicker than most Uzbek non, chewy, with a smooth golden crust, and put a loaf at about 1.5 kilograms.

The yeasted dough is made the night before and left to ferment, according to a report by the Uzbek news agency Dunyo on coverage in the Belgian daily De Tijd. In the morning it is shaped into rounds and the centres are pressed down so they will not puff up, then pricked with a stamp, sprinkled with sesame seeds and brushed with egg yolk and butter for a golden colour.

Baked on the walls of a tandir

Like other Uzbek non, Samarkand bread is baked in a tandir, a clay oven: the baker, a nonvoy, slaps the raw rounds onto the hot inner wall. Before that, each centre is pressed down and stamped with a chekich, a tool of wood and wire whose holes, Wikipedia explains, let steam rise from the flattened middle. According to Tasting Table, each nonvoy has a bread design of his own.

In Samarkand, the Siab bazaar has a whole section for non. The loaves travel, too: AramcoWorld noted that Samarkand non freezes well and is often taken overseas as a gift from home, and the news site Gazeta.uz observed that many tourists buy it at the end of a trip to the region.

The air of Samarkand

A story about the bread, retold by Wikipedia and by the Dunyo agency, concerns a khan of Bukhara who tasted Samarkand non and had the city’s best baker brought to Bukhara to make it. However hard the baker tried, the bread tasted different in Bukhara, even with flour and water from Samarkand. The baker concluded that the missing ingredient was the air of Samarkand, and he was allowed to go home. Middle East Eye also notes the folk belief that Samarkand’s air gives its non a flavour that cannot be copied.

Bread that is never cut

In Uzbekistan non is treated with respect. It is torn by hand rather than cut with a knife, it should not be placed upside down, and a piece that falls is put on a wall or in a tree for the birds. At a wedding the bride and groom each take a bite of a loaf and finish it the next morning; when a son leaves home for military service or work abroad, he bites two loaves, which are dried and hung up until he returns. In Samarkand, AramcoWorld reported, engagement bread is coloured pink and yellow and always bought in pairs.

In February 2025 Uzbekistan’s Ministry of Justice registered Samarkand flatbread as a geographical indication, presenting the certificate on 4 February; Kursiv reported that the aim is to protect local entrepreneurs’ exclusive right to the name, and the national news agency UzA reported that work had begun to propose it for UNESCO’s intangible heritage list. In Emblem World, Samarkand non sits in the Uzbekistan food collection, where people discover and rate local food, drink and music.