#57 Mongolia

Mongolia is that space between Russia and China, a vast plateau of desert and grasslands, where nomadic peoples rode horses and two-humped camels for millennia before Genghis Khan united the tribes formed the largest contiguous land empire in history.

Mongolia is the most sparsely populated country in the world, with some desert areas being completely uninhabited. Following Mongolia’s 20th century socialist phase, the majority of the approximately three million population are settled in urban areas, with over one million people living in the capital, Ulaanbaatar. Up to a third of the population remains nomadic to some degree, living in portable wooden-framed tents known as gers, from the Mongolian term for “house” or “home”.

Very little of the vast swathes of emptiness are suitable for arable farming due to long and very cold winters and low rainfall. There are up to 250 days per year of blue skies! Agriculture primarily focuses on the husbandry of 25 million sheep, yaks, horses, camels and goats.

The limited crops cultivated are mainly cereals, potatoes and simple vegetables like onions. Traditional Mongolian cuisine is therefore heavily based around meat and dairy products, with little use of herbs, spices, or flavours generally.

Meat

Choice cuts of meat are often cooked using a special type of barbecuing method whereby hot stones cook the meat inside a metal container. Carrot, potato and onion are usually included, and the meal is known as khorkhog.

As you can imagine though, it’s a waste-not-want-not situation in Mongolia. Five fingers is another meat dish, eaten in gers. Exactly like the Kyrgyz beshbarmak it is so named because you are supposed to eat it with your hands. This is a pot of the boiled remains of the animal you’ve already enjoyed the steak from on the barby, and includes the ribs, liver, stomach, eyeballs…

Dairy

Europeans have traditionally preserved milk that cannot be refrigerated by creating delicious cheeses; Mongolians have adopted different techniques to prolong the life of milk. Horse, yak or camel milk curds can be dried to form a hard, sour block known as aruul. I found one source that described eating it as quite like “chewing stones”.

Perhaps slightly more appetising than bricks of cheese is clotted cream. Orom is clotted cream from yaks or goats and is served as a sweet treat with jam or sugar.

Airag might be the ‘national drink’ of Mongolia. This is fermented horse milk, slightly alcoholic and enjoyed at celebrations. The hard stuff comes from fermenting yak’s milk though. Mongol arkhi, which is reported to be consumed in vast quantities, is similar to vodka but with a meatier taste.

Dumplings

Just like its neighbours, China and Russia, there is a variety of wheat flour dumplings to try in Mongolia. All have similar fillings, usually mutton.

Khuushur are mutton-filled deep-fried pastries, and buuz are steamed dumplings filled with mutton, onion and garlic. Buuz are typically fairly large for dumplings and are made with a little hole in the top to allow the steam to escape. You’ll find them in homes, restaurants and sold by street vendors alike, particularly around the lunar new year celebration. Another type of mutton-filled dumpling is bansh, which are similar to buuz but smaller, completely sealed and boiled rather than steamed.

Tea

Mongolians drink a lot of tea. Known as suutei tsai, it is prepared with plenty of milk and salt. Weird? It’s also common to add toasted millet to the tea to create a hearty soupy beverage. Weirder?

Weirdest? Banshtai tsai is created when bansh dumplings are cooked in the milky, salty, cereraly tea.

Weird to you and me, but banshtai tsai is chicken soup for the soul for Mongolians and is said to have all sorts of health benefits. This dish is of such important cultural heritage that it is included in a UNESCO list of sustainable recipes. Banshtai tsai usually includes sheep tail fat and can also include other pieces of mutton and dried meat, known as borts, similar to jerky.

Sheep tail fat is also used in Arabic cooking so you could probably find it in your local halal shop, but I simply chopped up some fatty pieces of lamb and fried them in a healthy amount of butter to start off the dish. Once the meat and butter were both nicely browned, I added a little bit of plain flour and some quinoa, which has a similar taste and texture to millet, to soak up all that toasted butter flavour. A litre of strong green tea went in next, and I left that simmering away to slowly cook the lamb pieces and the quinoa, while I faffed about making the bansh.

Toasting the quinoa in the buttery lamb fat

If you’ve been following my blog, you’ll know how bad I am at the fiddly stuff! Room for improvement!

The bansh were a simple flour and water dough wrapper filled with lamb mince (with the highest fat content I could find to make them as juicy as possible) mixed with a small amount of onion, spring onion and garlic, and seasoned only with salt.

Just before adding the dumplings to the tea to cook, I splashed in a load of milk and brought it back to the boil.