Food in Bhutan #1

People who have traveled through Bhutan as tourists often complain about the monotony and insipidity of the food. It's always the same, they opine, and it is often just indistinguishable goo with tasteless steam-table rice and overcooked vegetables. Often, there is a meat dish that is unidentifiable and mostly bone with a lot of fat swimming on the surface. Breakfast will invariably include fried eggs and toast (since bread is not a staple in Bhutan, the toast is perfectly square white bread redolent with a particularly odiferous and tangy type of local yeast) and corn flakes, served with warm reconstituted powdered milk. The tea is weak milk tea; the coffee is Nescafe. Having spoken to these travelers before my arrival here, I was nervous about being a vegetarian and about becoming bored with the tedium of the same foods at every meal. I need not have worried.

The reason tourists have such negative experiences with Bhutan's cuisine is because they do not actually experience real Bhutanese cooking: the hotels that accommodate tourists seem to cater to a caricature of a tourist--someone who can't handle hot food, who won't eat what looks "weird", who disdains rice, and who likes all the nutrients and texture cooked out of everything. This cartoon traveler MUST have eggs for breakfast and certainly will not tolerate any other hot liquid at meals other than bland tea and instant coffee. Granted, Bhutan, which is just now beginning to develop its tourist industry, has to feed Japanese, German, Dutch, British and American tourists who all have different culinary likes and dislikes, but it seems a shame that Bhutan feels it must forsake its local cuisine as a result.

Real Bhutanese cooking does indeed rely primarily on a trio of foodstuffs that appear in virtually every dish--chiles, salt and oil--but by virtue of the need to be creative with such a limited pantry and because of the influence of Indian and Nepali cooking techniques and spices, Bhutanese food is delicious, healthy (for the average Bhutanese person who labors in the fields all day), inexpensive and easy to prepare.

Students Preparing Chiles for our Teachers' Day Meal

At the heart of Bhutanese cuisine is ema datse, the chili and cheese dish I'd heard about from previous BCF teachers. Very simply, it is hot fresh or dried chiles, sometimes cooked with onions in oil to which is added the local farmer's cheese, called 'datse', and a slice of Amul cheese, a processed orange cheese from India that adds mouth feel and melts quickly. A little water is added to steam the chilies and incorporate the cheese. It is served as a dish separate from, but accompanied by, rice, which is NEVER tasteless or overcooked: Bhutanese rice, usually the red rice sold for $8 a half pound at Whole Foods, is flavorful, something like Jasmine rice, and has a texture I can only describe as al dente; it is chewier than white rice (here, a kilo of this rice costs about $2).

Everyone in Bhutan easts rice three times a day, if not more frequently, and the quantity of rice eaten at each meal is astonishing. I often see students with several cups of rice mounded on their plates at lunch, eaten with about half a cup of a simple potato curry (potatoes are the fourth staple in the Bhutanese diet--again, cheap, easy to grow and transport, and plentiful). Teachers bring their tiffins or their insulated lunch buckets full of rice--probably three or four cups--and it is all gone by the meal's end.

Teacher Meal (from back to front): rice, bean curry, naja,
ema datse, potato curry. The pink container is full of rice;
the red container had a savory and salty fried dough
snack in it.

To vary the diet, ema datse is sometimes made with potatoes or with mushrooms or with any vegetable at hand (beans, for example, in the spring). Indian spices such as mustard seed, cumin, or ajwain may be added. Though it is hard to believe, I still enjoy eating ema datse, the hotter (in spiciness) the better.

Chile choices at the veggie market

Dried local chiles

Perhaps my favorite food here, however, is Tibetan in origin: momos. Anyone who has been to northeastern India, Nepal or Dharamsala knows the momo. It is essentially a piroschki or pierogi, a steamed stuffed dough, here served with ezzay, a sauce of chiles steeped in salt, oil, and spices (the word 'ezzay' actually means salad, but it is usually meant to indicate the chile sauce). The stuffing for momos can be beef or pork, but most often they are stuffed with cabbage cooked with onions, or cheese. When the dough is soft and the filling cooked so that the cabbage is still just slightly crunchy these are delectable. I can eat fifteen of them if left to my own devices.

Cabbage momos and ezzay

Accompanying almost every meal--indeed, accompanying almost every move one makes--is sweet milk tea or naja. Made with loose tea leaves and sweetened powdered milk boiled until the tea is very dark to which is added ginger or cloves or cinnamon or all three, this tea is addictive, though dangerously sweet (it does not, however, approach the sweetness of Indian tea which I actually could not drink). In colder weather or in the evening or when someone just feels like having it, instead of naja there is suja: butter tea. Fortifying, rich, and almost cloying, this tea is not sweet. It is filling and nutritious--if one is trekking across the Himalayas with one's yaks. I think perhaps it is not so nutritious for sedentary teachers and government workers who get their calories from cheese and mountains of rice and naja. Many of us teachers complain about Bhutan Belly, the pudginess that results from a diet that is almost 80% carbohydrates (a pudginess I resent but have to learn to accept as a reality of my new life in Bhutan).

Other foods that are common here are curries, a term used to describe any number of dishes made with mixed vegetables seasoned with ginger, chiles (of course), turmeric, and Indian spices. These are not the curries of the the Punjab or Rajasthan--the use of chiles and the particular mix of spices differentiates them from what we in America think of as a curry.

Preparing a curry

The fast food of choice, aside from the Indian version of Cheetos and Lays Potato Chips (which come in "Tomato Masala" flavor and "American Sour Cream and Onion") is Maggi, Koka or Wai Wai Noodles. These are all essentially salty, spicy varieties of ramen and every restaurant in Bhutan that does NOT cater to tourists has them on the menu as "Chow Min" (sic). They are cooked up somewhat dry and vegetables such as spring onions and beans are added. Frankly, it's pretty tasty and filling. Students here at PHSS buy Maggi noodles at our canteen and, prior to opening the packet, crush the noodles into tiny pieces, then tear open the top and pour in the flavor packet. They then pinch closed the top of the bag and shake the whole thing to evenly distribute the salt and spices. This is their snack, often several times a day (one cannot live on Maggi noodles alone: there is the story of the married couple from Canada who came to Bhutan as BCF teachers and who lived exclusively on Maggi Noodles. They were sent home extremely malnourished, he with infected hemorrhoids).

For a while, my snack of choice was a small, salted, dried plum. The initial taste is overwhelmingly of salt, but when that is sucked off, there is a sweet little plum, like an umaboshi, at the center. There was something about the complementarity of the salty and the sweet that I loved. I became so fond of these, I was eating them like popcorn. I had to stop when I began getting leg cramps at night from being dehydrated from all that sodium.

Dried Plums

NEXT INSTALLMENT ABOUT FOOD: Chile Pops, channa, dal, and how to make an ezzay you can serve at Superbowl Games.