Dograma

History

Dograma is a Turkmen dish that combines crumbled flatbread with boiled meat (mutton or beef) shredded by hand, mixed with hot broth and onions, until the bread absorbs the liquid without falling apart completely.

Its name, which literally means “cut into pieces” in Turkmen, precisely describes the central gesture of its preparation: the meat is never sliced with a knife but always shredded by hand, a gesture considered more respectful of the meat’s texture and inherited from the nomadic traditions of the Central Asian steppes.

Ingredients — serves 4

• 500 g mutton or beef, for boiling
• 4 flatbreads (chorek or pita as a substitute)
• 2 onions
• 1 liter broth from cooking the meat
• Salt, black pepper

Dograma, step by step

1. Boil the meat in salted water with an onion until very tender, about 1.5 hours.
2. Remove the meat from the broth and shred it entirely by hand, without using a knife.
3. Crumble the flatbread into irregular pieces in a large dish.
4. Slice the second onion thinly and mix it with the crumbled bread.
5. Add the shredded meat, then generously ladle over hot, strained broth.
6. Mix everything gently and serve at once, while the bread is still slightly crisp in places.

Cooking method

Technique: hand-shredding the meat rather than cutting it with a knife, assembling the crumbled bread with hot broth just before serving.
Traditional equipment: a large pot for the broth, a shared dish for the final mix.
Signs it’s ready: the bread should absorb the broth without turning completely soft — a slight contrast in texture should remain.

Economic context

Turkmenistan has no data point at all in the World Bank Food Prices for Nutrition dataset — a gap tied to the country’s limited engagement with international statistical reporting, and one of the harder cases encountered while sourcing this series. The Europe & Central Asia regional average is shown instead. Dograma itself is built for economy of a different kind: it exists to make a single portion of boiled meat go further by stretching it with bread and its own cooking broth, a technique common to nomadic and pastoral cuisines with limited access to fresh meat day to day.

Source: World Bank / FAO, Food Prices for Nutrition database (Cost and Affordability of a Healthy Diet) v4.0, 2024 data, CC BY 4.0, DOI 10.57966/41AN-KY81. Retrieved 29 July 2026. Turkmenistan has no data point in this dataset for any year; the figure shown is the Europe & Central Asia regional average for 2024. It is not a costing of this specific recipe.

Nutrition, per serving

Calculated from the raw ingredient quantities above, divided by four servings.

The bread absorbs a meaningful share of the broth’s fat along with its flavor, which is part of why dograma reads as heartier than a typical bread-and-broth dish elsewhere.

Who this dish suits

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