Samarkand bread

...There is no tastier bread than Samarkand one. Real Samarkand bread should be eatable within three years. It is enough to splash water on it and heat in the tandyr (clay oven used to bake bread). Everyone, who has ever visited Samarkand, does not leave it without Samarkand bread. It is various: small with sesame seeds, large glazed bread and always incomparably delicious, so there is nothing surprising in the fact, that people said legends about it.

Once Khan of Bukhara asked his advisers, why the bread is taken from Samarkand to Bukhara, if they could bake it in Bukhara. He was told that bread would be tasty if it was baked only in Samarkand, but the khan did not believe the advisers and ordered to bring Samarkand bakers to Bukhara. The order was carried out. Khan sent people to Samarkand to find the best baker in the city and ordered him to bake bread in Bukhara. But the bread turned out different than it was expected. Advisers decided that the case was in the ingredients and brought from Samarkand a tandyr oven, flour, water, but even then the bread differed from Samarkand one. Then the baker said: "Probably the case is in the air." But it was impossible to transport the air, and soon the baker was allowed to return home, and people began to carry bread from Samarkand as before.

This tradition has been preserved to this day. No one leaves from Samarkand without the famous bread, which remain soft for a long time.