Summer Street Drink · Fermented Rye Bread
Kvass
📷 Closely related photo — Photo: Jorge Láscar / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 2.0
In Soviet times, yellow tank trucks sold kvass on street corners from Moscow to Kazakhstan, often with a single shared glass rinsed between customers.
Rye bread is fermented into a lightly fizzy, faintly sour, barely alcoholic drink, sold ice-cold from tanker trucks and roadside barrels through the summer months. Petropavlovsk and other northern Kazakh cities near the Russian border keep the tradition alive with vendors setting up curbside taps as soon as the weather turns hot.
Why it's made this way: Petropavlovsk sits on the Ishim River just south of the Russian border and carries a strong Russian and Cossack settlement history; kvass followed that Russian influence south and remains one of the clearest culinary markers of the region's Slavic heritage.
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Part of World of Street Food — 3443 dishes from 118 countries.
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