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.
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| 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.
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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.
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| Chile choices at the veggie market |
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| Dried Plums |
NEXT INSTALLMENT ABOUT FOOD: Chile
Pops, channa, dal, and how to make an ezzay you can serve at
Superbowl Games.
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