You can't say you have really tasted Tibetan food without trying qingke wine, buttered tea, sheep blood soup and yak meat.



Introduction

In company with their unique culture, Tibetans have food of a very distinctive character.

Among the great variety of Tibetan food, zanba and buttered tea are the most popular and distinguished. The former, made of qingke (barley flour) and tasting a little bit sour, is very nutritious and easy to take, while the latter, a Juema, a Tibetan snack mixture of butter, tea and salt, claims to be a good energy-giving beverage. Quite a few tourists drink it during their stay in Tibet in order to adapt to the high altitudes and dry climate and it becomes quite addictive. Qinke wine, however, seems to have quite the opposite effect due to its strong after-effects. Many outsiders shrink from the challenge of drinking this wine despite in popularity with the locals.

Other typical Tibetan foods include dried meat, mutton served with sheep's trotters, roast sheep intestine, yogurt and cheese.

All the hotels in Tibet serve Tibetan food and the Tibetan restaurants along Eastern Beijing Road in Lhasa enjoy quite a reputation among tourists. Snow Goddess Palace at the foot of the Potala attracts innumerable tourists with its authentic Tibetan cuisine. If you enjoy a feast there you will be offered the following: For the first course you will be served cold dishes such as zanba, yak meat, beef tripe and ox tongue. Next comes the hot dishes of sheep blood soup, fried sheep lung and stir-fried beef with pickled carrot. The staple is steamed buns stuffed with minced beef and potato, or rice fried with butter. What a treat not only for your stomach, but also for your eyes. Nevertheless, most people only taste a little of these beautiful dishes.

Tibetan food is not the only choice for tourists of today. Different styles of food, such as Sichuan and Guangdong cuisine, are also available at hotels and street side restaurants in such cities as Lhasa, Zetang and Xigaze. Western restaurants and buffet cafeterias are also available for the slightly more unadventurous of tourists.

Tsam-pa

The basic Tibetan meal is tsampa, a kind of dough made with roasted barley flour and yak butter with water, beer. It has a certain novelty value the first time you try it, but only a Tibetan can eat it every day and still look forward to the next meal. Outside Lhasa, Tibetan food is limited mainly to momos and thugpa.

Highland Barley, also called Barley, is the principal material used to make Tsam-pa. Tibetan barley is widely grown in Tibet and on the Qinghai-Tibet plateau due its endurance to the local harshness and coldness.

Method of making: grind the sauted Highland Barley into flour then mix it with ghee. The Tsam-pa made of Highland Barley is not only the traditional food of Tibetan people, but frequently appears in main hotels in Lhasa as the main dish used to feast guests from home and abroad. In religious festivals, Tibetans will cast Tsam-pa to express their blessing to each other.

There are two main ways of preparing and eating the tsam-pa. One is to make a tsam-pa dough with the Tibetan buttered tea while the other is to make porridge together with beef or mutton and vegetables such as turnip. The tsam-pa porridge is known as tu-pa.

Unlike the tsam-pa dough served with the Tibetan buttered tea, the tu-pa porridge is often served with sugar. The tsam-pa dough served with the Tibetan buttered tea more often than not tastes salty.

Yak Butter

Yak Butter, refined from the milk of cattle and goats, is the daily food of Tibetans. It is intriguing for Tibetans to refine yak butter. As milk segregators are not widely used in the pasturing area in Tibet, Tibetan people usually refine milk in old way. Tibetan women pour the heated milk into a big wooden bucket called "Xue Dong", then whip forcibly up and down for hundreds of times to segregate grease from water. Step by step, a tier of something light yellow will surface, subsequently ladle the floating and put it into a leather bag to cool it. In this way, the refinement of yak butter ends. Yak butter has very high value of nutrition. Tibetans usually eat fruits and vegetables little, especially in pasturing area, the daily required heat energy is supplied by yak butter besides meats.

Main Types of Food

In winter, beef and mutton are cut into long stripes to be air-dried in the circular ground caves or bins walled with stones or dungs. Dried beef and mutton keep better and longer, as the bacteria in them are killed during the drying process in deep winter. Dried meat also packs well. In the next year, the dried meat will be Bar-B-Qed or be eaten raw.

Big chucks of fresh meat are boiled in a pot. Salt, ginger, spices are added. The meat is served when it changes colour. People take the meat by hands and cut them with the carried knives. The breasts and spareribs are for the guests. The tails of white sheep are for the guests of honor. If a young man is treated with a tail of white sheep in his girl friend's house, it implies that he can hope.

There are four different sausages in Tibet: blood, meat, flour and liver.

Milk is drunk fresh or made yogurt, or is separated by churning into butter and curds.



The Tibetan butter is home-made and can be further processed and refined into butter known elsewhere. Butter is used for food with 'tsamba', tea etc., or for the fuel of lamp.
After butter is made from milk, the remains become sour and can be made curd. Milk curd placed in the mouth and sucked on helps to quench thirst and can be mixed with barley flour to make curd-pastry, a holiday delight.

The milk is boiled first, after removed from stove, some old yogurt is added. Yogurt will form in a few hours. In the central and western parts, the yogurt is thin and smooth. In the east, it is too thick to stir. Yogurt is mentioned in the famous poem the story of 'Gesar', and has been a Tibetan food for more than 1,000 years.

Popular and Recommended Tibetan Dishes

tsampa (roasted barley flour); momo (steamed or fried dumplings); stir-fried meats; thukpa (noodle soup with meat and sometimes vegetables); carrot cake; banana porridge; lamb with radish; caramel tea; soja (butter tea); qingke wine

Source: China Tibet Tour