Directory A–Z - Tibet - page 616

dishes such as damje or shomday (butter fried rice with raisins and yoghurt), droma desi
(wild ginseng with raisins, sugar, butter and rice) and shya vale (fried pancake-style pasties
with a yak-meat filling). Formal Tibetan restaurants ( sakhang in Tibetan) in particular are
very big on yak offal, with large sections of menus sumptuously detailing the various ways
of serving up yak tongues, stomachs and lungs.
In rural areas and markets you might see strings of little white lumps drying in the sun
that even the flies leave alone - this is dried yak cheese and it's eaten like a boiled sweet.
For the first half-hour it is like having a small rock in your mouth, but eventually it starts to
soften up and taste like old, dried yak cheese.
Also popular among nomads is yak sha (dried yak jerky). It is normally cut into strips and
left to dry on tent lines and is pretty chewy stuff.
DHARMA FOOD
Need to cook dinner for a visiting rinpoche? Try Tibetan Cooking: Recipes for Daily Living,
Celebration, and Ceremonyby Elizabeth Kelly or The Lhasa Moon Tibetan Cookbookby
Tsering Wangmo. Both books offer recipes for everything from momos(dumplings) to
Milarepa-style nettle soup.
CHINESE
Chinese restaurants can be found in every settlement in Tibet these days, but are around
50% more expensive than elsewhere in China.
Chinese food in Tibet is almost exclusively Sichuanese, the spiciest of China's regional
cuisines. One popular Sichuanese sauce is yúxiāng (), a spicy, piquant sauce of garlic, vin-
egar and chilli that is supposed to resemble the taste of fish (though it's more like a sweet
and tangy marinade). You'll also taste huājiāo (Sichuan pepper), a curious mouth-numbing
spice popular in Sichuanese food.
Outside of Lhasa, few Chinese restaurants have menus in English and when they do the
prices are often marked up by as much as 50%. We indicate restaurants with English
menus by the icon . In most restaurants you can simply wander out into the kitchen and
point to the vegetables and meats you want fried up, but you'll miss out on many of the
most interesting sauces and styles this way.
Chinese snacks are excellent and make for a fine light meal. The most common are
shuǐjiǎo (ravioli-like dumplings), ordered by the bowl or weight (half a jin, or 250g, is enough
for one person), and bāozi (thicker steamed dumplings), which are similar to momos and
are normally ordered by the steamer, and are a common breakfast food. Both are dipped in