Staple food of daily life (pa)
Tsampa, Roasted Barley Dumpling
EverydayDocumented🧂facile20 min
Roasted barley flour that is mixed directly in the bowl with butter tea to form, with the fingertips, a firm dough shaped into a dumpling. It is the staple food of all Tibet: nutritious, portable, ready in an instant.
Why this dish? Tsampa was Alexandra's daily bread during her Himalayan years: easy to carry, it alone sufficed, kneaded in the butter tea dregs of her bowl, to fuel a day's walk.
Here is the whole secret of my endurance on the trails! I kept a mouthful of butter tea at the bottom of my bowl, threw in a handful of this roasted barley flour, and with my fingertips — it takes a bit of skill, I grant you — I kneaded a firm dumpling. No fire, no pot: tsampa is eaten anywhere, even crouched in a cave watching for caravans. I always had a small sack under my pilgrim's robe; it was my bread for months, and I never found it monotonous.
Ingredients
- •Ground roasted barley (tsampa) — two handfuls (basic starch)
- •Salted butter tea (po cha) — a little left in the bowl (fatty and salty binder)
- •Extra yak butter — to taste (enrichment)
- •Crumbled dry cheese (chhurpi) — optional (protein addition)
How it was made : Every Tibetan carried their own tsampa and personal wooden bowl. Barley, the only cereal that ripens above 3,500 m altitude, was roasted and then ground in water mills by streams. The dumpling was kneaded directly in the bowl, without any utensil.
Sources : Alexandra David-Néel, Voyage d'une Parisienne à Lhassa, Plon, 1927 · Rinjing Dorje, Food in Tibetan Life, Prospect Books, 1985