The Azerbaijan cuisine is inclined to use such spices as saffron, caraway-seeds, fennel, anise, capsicum, laurel, coriander and spice taste leaf vegetables as mint, dill, parsley, celery, tarragon, basil, savory, thyme etc. Such seasoning as lemon, olives, milk, cream, food acids, abqora, azgilsharab, narsharab, cherry plums, albukhara, gora, kizil-akhta, kuraqa (dried apricots), lavashana, sumakh and others are widely used to improve the food taste and smell. Meat dishes as well as fish and poultry show a wonderful delicacy being cooked with such additions like chestnuts and nut kernel.

Resulting from different combination of these spices and basic ingredients (and this depends on local resource specifics) every region shows its prevalent variation of the known traditional dishes. For example, such classical Azeri dish as dolma (translated from Azeri-Turkish means "filled", i.e. "stuffed") at some regions is cooked in vine leaves, at others - in mulberry leaves, at thirds - in cabbage leaves. Besides, dolma can also be cooked in eggplants, tomatoes, pepper, onions, apples, quince etc.

Heyva dolmasi

About 30 types of dolma are traditionally popular over Azerbaijan. In the region of Guba, known for its numerous fruit gardens, the most popular dolma variations are heyva-dolmasi (in quince) and alma-dolmasi (in apple). Locals of Guba cook their flavorful and tasty fruit dolma in the following way. They slightly fry the mutton forcemeat, add spices, and stew it till ready. They take medium size and round shape fruit, cut away the top side like a "pan-cover", delete the core and fill the emptied fruit with stuffing and chestnuts and return the "pan-cover" onto its place. Stuffed in this way fruit must be cooked boiling in little volume of broth.

For cooking of this dish you must consider really endless list of details. Thus cookers from Guba prefer not to go deep into the process details, as its impossible to tell you at once every single thing you should do while cooking their dolma. Instead of featuring details they use to remind you the old rule of Azerbaijan cookery: for cooking one meal delicious, its cooker must be in a good mood, be kind and necessarily sing something or at least hum a lovely tune.

The Guba cuisine made its contribution also to the confectionary tradition of Azerbaijan. Round flat cakes with shortbread stuffing are widely known as "tykhma a-la Guba".

Besides, naturally, here must be mentioned wonderful fruit and berry compotes and preserves of quince, apple, pear, apricot, cherry, plum, cornel, nuts, rose petals, strawberry, blackberry, grapes. They have tradition of producing jams and preservations even of vegetables, such as tomatoes, eggplants, pumpkin. If ingredient fruit contains enough moisture itself (cherry, fig, strawberry etc.), its jam or preservation can be produced without adding any water - in its own juice and sugar.