During a long period of time local people ate only the gifts of taiga forest and Baikal Lake. The prepared dishes were not so diverse, but rather nutritious. They knew many ways of cooking the food on the fire. People smoked dried and salted meat and fish for future use.

Speaking about today’s cuisine, the traditional cuisine of Baikal Region can be imaginary divided into Byruat, Russian and Baikal.

Traditional Byruat cuisine is simple for cooking and nutritious. The basis of it is meat and milk.

Byruat pozy (chopped minced pork, mutton, beef, which is rolled in pastry) is a favourite national dish of local people. Milk is an essential part of their cuisine. Any holiday starts with diary products. As Russian people meet their guests with bread and salt, so Byruat people do it with milk, sour cream and cream. They always drink their tea with milk. If you are lucky, you can try a low-alcohol drink tarasun made of milk and salamat – a kind of cereal made of sour cream together with salt and flour. 

As for Russian cuisine in Baikal, the main traditional dishes are borsch or cabbage soup, boiled and after that fried in oil potatoes, pickled mushrooms, vegetable salads, sauerkraut, fruit drink or kvas.  

Russian cuisine is famous for pelmeni (meat dumplings) and meat “a la Siberia”. In ancient times hunters going to taiga took them frozen in cloth bags, which could be just put into hot water and as soon as they came to the surface, they were ready. Rosted pelmeni are also rather delicious.The peculiarity of meat “a la Siberia” is that the meat is seasoned with damsons and fern. Baked potatoes or frozen berries (red bilberry or cranberry) are usually served with this dish.

Besides, if you find yourself in the house of Siberian person, you’ll surely find on the table home preserved vegetables, tomatoes in their own juice, cucumbers, cabbage, salted mushrooms such as milk mushrooms or saffron milk caps, pickled boletus luteus, paste made of vegetable marrows, jam made of taiga berries and sauerkraut with red bilberry or cranberry. Sometimes you can taste fern and damsons salad.  

 Of course, an essential part of Russian cuisine is pie. Pies can be of different shape and with various stuffing – red bilberry, fish, damsons, rice, mushrooms or eggs. Traditionally red bilberry juice is served together with pies. When people in Baikal drink tea, they sometimes add frozen sea-buckthorn or red bilberry into it.

Finally, speaking about purely Baikal cuisine, the main ingredient here is fish from the legendary lake. Among them are omul, pollan, grayling and sturgeon. The most famous dish made of fish is a kind of soup called “ukha”. Baikal ukha is cooked of fresh fish according to special recipe. Only fish which is just caught in crystal clean lake is taken for the soup. When the dish is ready, it has a very fragrant and unforgettable smell.

A zest of local cuisine long ago became freshly-salted omul. It is famous for its delicate taste even outside Siberia. There are different ways of salting the fish, so that the taste of the fish depends on the way and period of salting. Among the gourmets it is well known as ideal hors d'oeuvre to Russian vodka.
Another purely Baikal dish is omul rosted on rozhny (wooden skewer).For this dish fresh fish is salted, after that is stringed on rozhny and roasted on coals. Many guests are amazed at the taste of this original dish.

One more exotic dish which is typical for Baikal is stroganina (raw frozen meat of roe) or raskolotka (raw frozen fish), which you can believe or not are eaten raw, but with salt and seasoned. You can taste it only in winter during the process of fishing or hunting.