Every few weeks a customer from outside Balochistan picks up a kurud ball at our counter, turns it over like a small white stone, and asks what it is. The honest answer surprises people: it is yogurt. Kurud is fresh yogurt that has been strained thick, salted, rolled into balls and dried in the sun until it is hard enough to knock against the counter. Nothing is added to preserve it. The drying is the preservation. At WD Foods it costs Rs 900 for 500g and Rs 1,800 for 1kg, taken from our own product page on 30 October 2026, and it is one of the oldest foods we sell.
A food invented by people who could not carry a fridge
Start with the problem kurud solves. Herding families across Balochistan and Central Asia had milk and yogurt in the good months and long journeys, dry winters and empty months ahead of them. Yogurt spoils in days. So they strained it, salted it and dried it, and the result travels in a saddlebag, survives summer heat and waits out the winter when the animals give little milk. The food goes by a family of names across the region: kurud and quroot here, qurut and kurt further north, kashk in Persian, jameed in Jordan. The word itself comes from the Turkic word for dry. Food historians trace versions of it back centuries, to the nomad cultures of the steppe, which makes kurud less a recipe than a technology: dairy, made permanent.
How a ball of kurud is made
The making is slow but not complicated. Yogurt is hung in cloth and strained until it stands thick, the stage called suzma in Central Asia, where a spoon can stand up in it. Salt is worked through. Then the mixture is rolled by hand into balls, traditionally around the size of a large gumball, though sizes vary from maker to maker. The balls are laid out, covered with clean cloth to keep the dust and birds off, and dried in the sun for days until they are fully hard. What leaves the cloth is a fraction of the yogurt that went in, because most of yogurt is water and the water is gone. That concentration is the whole story of kurud: its keeping quality, its strong taste and its price per kilo all come from how much fresh yogurt a kilo of dry balls represents.
What it tastes like, without pretending
Kurud is intensely savoury, salty and tangy, closer to a dried, salted feta than to anything sweet. One food writer who knows it well describes the taste exactly that way, and it is the comparison I use at the counter. Eaten straight, it is an acquired taste and a slow one: you do not bite a kurud ball the way you bite an apple, because a properly dried ball is genuinely hard and your teeth will lose the argument. People who grew up with it suck and nibble small pieces and find it deeply moreish. People meeting it for the first time usually prefer it softened and cooked, which is how most kurud is actually eaten.
The ways kurud is actually eaten
Dissolved, as a sauce over bread. This is the great dish of the kurud world. Crush or grate the balls, soak them in hot water and work them back into a thick, yogurt like sauce. In Tajikistan this becomes qurutob, a national dish: the sauce is poured over torn flatbread in a wide dish, topped with fried onion, tomato and cucumber, and eaten shared from the plate. Make it at home with roti and you are close enough to understand why people cross provinces for it.
Stirred into soups and thin daals. A piece of kurud simmered into a soup dissolves slowly and gives the whole pot a salty, tangy depth that plain salt cannot. This is winter cooking: stored dairy standing in for fresh when fresh is not there.
As the traveller's snack it was designed to be. A few small pieces with bread and tea is the oldest serving of all. It asks for nothing, keeps forever in a pocket or a bag, and a little goes a long way because the flavour is concentrated.
What is in it, and the one caution
Because kurud is yogurt with the water removed, what remains is concentrated: a strong source of protein and calcium in a very small weight, which is exactly why it sustained travellers and, famously, why dried yogurt balls appear in old accounts of herders and prisoners surviving on little else. It is real food, not a novelty. The caution is salt. Kurud is salted on purpose, because salt is part of how it keeps, and anyone who has been told to watch their salt or their blood pressure should treat it as a seasoning strength food: a little worked into a dish, not a bowl eaten straight. Used the way the tradition uses it, spread through bread and vegetables and soup, the salt spreads with it.
Storing kurud, which mostly means keeping it dry
Properly dried kurud is famous for keeping for years without refrigeration, and while I will not ask you to test the upper limit, a jar of it in a cool, dry cupboard will outlast almost everything else in your kitchen. Its one enemy is moisture. A ball that picks up damp can soften and spoil, so keep the jar sealed, take pieces out with a dry hand, and never put a soaked piece back. If your kitchen is humid for months of the year, the fridge is a sensible home for the jar. Our kurud sits among the older foods of this region in our traditional items collection, and the season's full rates are in the dry fruits price list.
Questions I hear most
Is kurud a cheese or a yogurt? It starts as yogurt: fermented milk, strained. Because it is dried hard and eaten like a cheese, people argue it both ways, but yogurt is the honest answer, and you can prove it by dissolving a piece back into a yogurt like sauce.
How do I soften it? Crush or grate the ball first, then soak in hot water, stirring as it melts down. Whole balls dropped in water take much longer. Grated, it softens in minutes.
How long does kurud keep? Kept dry and sealed, a very long time, measured in years rather than weeks. Discard any piece that smells off or has taken on moisture and mould; good kurud smells tangy and clean.
Is it very salty? Yes, deliberately. Plan dishes around it the way you would plan around a salty cheese, and you rarely need to add much salt of your own.
Why have I never seen it outside Balochistan? Because it belongs to dry, high country and the herding life. In the cities it is quietly sold in traditional shops like ours, and once people from other provinces taste a proper qurutob style dish, they come back for it.
Buying it from us
WD Foods is the online store of Wahid Nimco, working from Quetta since 1990, and kurud is part of the traditional Balochistan shelf we have always kept. Order kurud (dry yogurt) at Rs 1,800 a kilo, delivered across Pakistan in 3 to 5 business days, or pick it up at the Masjid Road shop, open daily 9 AM to 10 PM, and ask us how the families here serve it. If you are buying it for the first time, start with 500g and make the bread dish first. That is the introduction kurud deserves.
Written by Syed Azib Anjum for WD Foods, Quetta. We pack and sell this kurud ourselves, and this guide is based on the questions our customers ask us most. Prices in this article were checked on 30 October 2026 and can change with the season, so please confirm the current rate on the product page before ordering.
Shop Kurud (Dry Yogurt) · Browse traditional items
Written by
Syed Azib Anjum
Marketing Head and Writer at WD Foods
Syed Azib Anjum runs WD Foods, the online store of Wahid Nimco in Quetta, and writes or reviews every guide on this blog. His articles come from daily work with nimko, dry fruits and seeds, and the prices he quotes are checked on the live product pages of this store.
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