Hot Laphing

This weekend, I went to visit Tashi Jong for my first social visit in more than a year.  Of course, I went in large part to visit my friend Sonam, the one who taught me how to make the Summer Chili that I posted very early on in this history of this blog.  Sonam and her sister are absolutely amazing cooks.  I think I eat more when I visit them than any other time in India, except when I visit certain restaurants in New Delhi.

Anyway, not long after I arrived, one heckuva storm hit, knocking out power. This meant we had nothing to do but cook, eat, and talk.  I ended up staying the night because of the sheer strength of the storm (which is always a pleasure with Sonam's family) and I took that time to interrogate her about some of my favorite dishes from her home.  For now, I will just post the recipes. I hope to post a photo guide when I get back to the states.  So let's start with the most unique dish I've ever had at her home, one I've never had anywhere else and I've been craving in the two years since I first tried it: Hot Laphing.  It's a unique mix of Chinese influence in Tibetan cooking!

Now, I've made a Laphing post before, however this starts with a completely different kind of laphing entirely, so be ready for something completely different.

Sonam's recipe started off with "buy one block of white laphing," but for most of us not living in a few specific countries in Asia, that's not possible. Fortunately, white laphing is very simple to make, unlike it's yellow sibling. I'll dedicate a post to white laphing and it's accompanying sauces later, but making the laphing itself is quite simple so let's start with that.

White Laphing (Without Sauce)
1 package of Mung Bean flour (available at most asian groceries)
Water

Take a very large pot on the stove, fill it about half way with water, get that going to a boil.

Meanwhile, take a pitcher and mix the mung bean flour and water until you have a liquid that looks like and has the consistency of light cream.

Slowly, and while stirring, pour the "cream" into the boiling water until you have an odd, gelatinous mess that is mostly clear, but slightly white-ish, like ice. It should not be white.  It should be distinctly translucent.  If it is white, the concentration of mung bean flour is too high and it will have a nasty consistency.


Here is a picture of finished white laphing (the blue is because it is under a tent).  Your gelatinous mess should be slightly-slightly more clear than this:

(Not my photo! So, credit where credit is due)

Once you have your weird gelatin, pour that into a wide tray, I usually use a cake pan, and let it cool and set.  This should take roughly an hour in a cake pan, less if you refrigerate it, and more if you use a deeper pan.  There you go! Laphing!

So now, what we use it for...

Hot Laphing
A large chunk of white laphing (say 2 cups per person), cut into 1" cubes
Vegetable oil
Finely chopped garlic
Meat, cut into bite sized pieces OR vegetables cut into bite sized pieces (less traditional and FAR less flavorful)
Erma/Hua Jiao (Sichuan peppercorns, mentioned at length here) finely ground-a few pinches
MSG (optional)-a large pinch
Salt to taste
Chili powder to taste
Sesame oil
Green onion, chopped

In a pot or pressure cooker, boil up the meat/veg in as little water as you can use to get it to boil.  We don't want to lose any flavor with excess water and we will be using the boiling water.  Just boil it for a minute or two, maximum.

In a large pot, heat up a few teaspoons of vegetable oil (enough to coat the bottom). When that's hot, toss in the garlic and stir until the garlic has browned and the oil has picked up the garlic aroma

Now add the meat/veg and when the oil has stopped sputtering, add some of the water from boiling (approx 1/3 cup per serving. NO MORE.  In fact it's better to go with less and you can add more later!)

Add powdered erma to taste, a pinch of MSG, salt to taste, chili powder to taste and let this cook together for a little while (a few minutes is all it needs).

Gently add the laphing, piece by piece.  Stir gently. It will break up a bit, but you don't want to break it up completely.  Break as little as possible. When the laphing is all stirred in, drizzle with sesame oil and sprinkle the green onion over this.  Give that a gentle stir to mix it in.

There you go! A super quick meal that is absolutely delicious!

Quick Tenthuk

So, I'm in Taiwan with a terrible cold right now. As evening rolled around, and I was completely exhausted and coughing, I had the question of did I want to go out and get dinner, which would involve turning myself into a functional, multilingual human being, go outside into the terrible heat, walk at least half a mile to go to a restaurant, or was I going to cook at home. Well, I wanted something for a cold, so I decided to make my go-to comfort food: Tenthuk.

Now, I have already posted the most traditional tenthuk recipe that I know, but that recipe takes a long time to prepare. It's very rare that your average person outside of Tibet takes the long time involved to make that meal. So the following recipe can be made, start to finish, in less than half an hour. Which is roughly the amount of time I was able to remain conscious. There are no photographs because I was having enough trouble figuring out whether I had added soy sauce or chinese black vinegar to the soup. Fortunately, it was soy sauce.

I made this for one (myself), ate two midsized bowls of it and the rest (I'd say about 1/3 of what I made) is in the fridge, so I would say I made the right amount. As a result, the amounts will seem like very little.

Ingredients:

2 cups Flour

Water

Vegetable oil

1/4 lb of beef, cut thin, one inch pieces.

half a medium sized tomato, chopped

1/4 of a large white onion (or one half of a small white onion!) chopped

1/4 inch of ginger root, finely minced (I went overboard with the ginger. It was delicious)

1 clove of garlic, crushed and minced

2-3 sprigs of scallions, roughly chopped

handful of greens of your choice (optional. I didn't have any. I recommend baby spinach)

soy sauce to taste

salt to taste

chili powder to taste

First, make your dough. Like a lot of the dough described previously, mix flour and water until you get a stretchy, but not terribly sticky ball of dough. You will need to knead it and experiment with how much flour and water. I never get it right on the first try. When you have this big ball of dough, separate it into small balls, about half the size of a fist. pour a little bit of oil over these and roll them around until they are lightly coated in oil. Cover this. If you haven't chopped your meats and vegetables and stuff, you might as well do it now. The dough does well to wait a bit, but it's not too necessary.

Take a pot and put it on the stove, heat up a bit of oil and start to fry up your meat. Stir this around a bit and add a sprinkling of salt. When the oil has picked up some meaty flavor, dump in the garlic, ginger, onions and tomatos. When I don't feel ready to fall down, I add the garlic and ginger first and fry that a bit before adding the others. Give me a break, I am sick and this is faster.

When the tomatos and onions have reduced, add water until you have about 2/3 your desired soup volume. Now add salt and soy to taste.

While this is boiling up you can add chili, if you like, or any other spices you want. Although my version is pretty traditional, don't hesitate to tweak it to your personal tastes!

When the soup is boiling and flavored as you like it, take a dough ball and roll it into a snake-like coil.

For this next step, you may need to add some oil to your fingertips. Take the dough coil and pinch it between your fingers to make a long tape, around 1 inch wide, and 1/8 of an inch thick or even thinner. Tear pieces off (about 1 inch by 1 inch) into the boiling soup. Stir occasionally. Continue until all the dough is gone, or until you have enough noodles. You can freeze the remaining dough for later.

The dough will need only a couple of minutes to boil. Remember to stir occasionally so the noodles don't stick.

As this is coming to a boil, toss in the scallions and greens. They should take only a minute to cook. When the greens have reduced or the scallions have slightly changed color, your soup is ready to eat! Enjoy!

An evening of cooking success!

Last night my friends and I hosted a Yushu fundraiser dinner. Saturday and sunday we spent all day cooking. My friends, Jessica, Tashi and I made about 400 momos, 200 meat and 200 potato. We bought a nice garlic chili sauce and I also made the summer chili recipe and we made a small side salad .

We had a few disasters including sticky steamers (even when oiled) a freezer accident where a whole bunch of momos stuck together, and arriving at the venue to find no sound system set up, but in the end it was a great success.

More than a pound of chili sauce was gone to the scrapings, we we finished the evening with a handful of each kind of momos, which we gave to the staff of Emack and Bolio's who gave us their space for the evening. We earned more than $600 to donate to victims of the quake in Yushu this past April.

All in all, a cooking success story!

HUGE thanks to the Palden family, fantastic local musicians Taina Asili, Gaetano Vaccaro and David Rubin who performed, and our wonderful friend Sonam who rushed in when crises hit at the end.


Recipes we cooked:

Beef Momos
Potato Momos
Sonam's Summer Chili

Uyghur Rice with Lamb

I was introduced to Uyghur food in 2008, and have been addicted to it since then. Uyghur food is similar to Jewish or Turkish food, and its very unique in central Asia. One of my favorites is a rice dish, I believe called "Polu" but I am not sure. I've heard the name only in passing, but I insisted on learning how to make it. So here's another favorite of mine

Uyghur Rice with Lamb

Ingredients:

2 cups basmati rice
3 cups water
1 lb of cubed, bite sized lamb (The lamb in my pictures was actually cut too large)
1 medium sized/small tomate, chopped
1 medium white onion, chopped
1-2 handfuls of shredded carrot
1-2 handfuls of golden raisins
2-3 tsp salt (to taste)
cinnamon (to taste)

Directions

Start by chopping your onions and tomatoes and shredding your carrots. I really think organic adds a lot of flavor, so if you have the choice, go with that. We used a nice heirloom tomato, which provided great flavor!


Heat up a pan with some oil. Start browning the onions and the meat together. Keep cooking until the onions have reduced.


When the onions have reduced, add chopped tomatoes.


Stir until the tomatoes have also reduced.

When the tomates are reduced, add your carrots right on top.


Now add the cinnamon and salt, stir and taste to make sure it tastes right. It should taste a bit saltier than you will like the final product, since you will be adding a lot of rice.


Once the spicing is correct, add 3 cups of water.


on top of this, well destributed, pour 2 cups of basmati rice.


Sprinkle a handful or two of golden raisins on the top.


Cover and cook on a medium flame for 25 minutes. On an electric stove, you might need to adjust this. The water should be simmering.


Stir and eat! mmm.

MOMOS! Beef Filling. A photo guide

The most famous and most popular Tibetan dish, hands down, is the momo. Momo is a dumpling, similar to gyoza and many other Asian dumplings.

In Tibet there are many kind of momos. The differences are not only the filling, but also the manner of cooking and even the dough. I plan on posting MANY momo recipes here, but I just wanted to start with one of the simples. Plain, everyday, thin skinned, beef momo.

Momo in Tibet would normally be filled with yak meat, but aside from once or twice a year when my brother and I spit out the $13/pound and get some ground yak meat (very difficult to find in the USA) we stick with beef. The best yak meat substitute is actually freerange buffalo. In some places, you can find that for only a dollar or two more per pound and the difference is really noticable.

Momo are great. Everyone loves them. My parents, brother, grandma. Here's the best part, on those rare occasions (like right now) when I am in the USA, my American high school and college friends who have no Tibet exposure aside from me specifically request momo parties! So the following photos were taken at last night's momo party. Sorry there aren't any photos of the finished momos. We...we ate them.

Beef Momos

Filling Ingredients
1/4 of a pound (roughly) of ground beef or lamb or bison per person present
2/3 the volume of beef in scallions (that is to say if the beef fills up half a bowl, you want 2/3 of the remaining half full of scallions)
white onion (optional, I use one really large white onion for 3 pounds of beef)
chopped fresh garlic, to taste
chopped ginger root, to taste
Soy sauce

Dough Ingredients
Flour
Water
a few pinches of salt

Equipment
Large mixing bowl
Medium mixing bowl
cutting board and knives
good, large steamer

Start by mixing flour and water in a bowl with a few pinches of salt until you have a stretchy, but not sticky ball of dough. Let this sit while you prepare everthing else. Cover it with a damp towel or something.
Put your beef into a mixing bowl and start chopping up your ginger, garlic, onions and scallions.


Now, add some soy sauce to taste and some warm water (for the quantity you see here, I used about a cup.) and mix this all together into a big pile of meat!



YAYYY. Meat.
OK, moving on. Take the dough and roll it between your hands to form coils about an inch and a half thick.

Slice these into discs about 3/4 of an inch thick and squish these between your hands in a spiralling motion.


Take the spiraled discs and start rolling them with a small rolling pin, rolling only the edges and turning the disc to get all sides. The center should be thicker than the edges. A 3 or 4 inch flat disc is ideal. If you lack a small wooden dowel, for a rolling pin, I recommend a beer bottle! As you can see, our men who were rolling were pleased. We let them drink the beers first.


Get some forks for your meat. Preferably, put them in the meat tines down. As you can see, we had problems with this.

And now the two most popular way to fold momos!

Circular Momos: Gently cupping a disc on your fingers, fork in about a tablespoon of filling.
Pinch one side, forming a corner, then keep pinching the edge over to that first pinch. Pull another bit of the edge and pinch to the first spot and continue doing this all the way around, it will start closing the dough. Use your thumb to gently push in the meat. Cup it carefully in your hand to help it keep a round shape.
A better angle to see the pinching.
Finally it will be pinched shut with a tiny spiral of dough at the top, pinch that spiral to itself to form a circle at the top.
And you get a beautiful final product like so!

And here, for you viewing pleasure, is the most beautiful momo I've ever made:


Crescent Shaped Momos:

Hold the dough disc in your hand and fill it kind of like a soft taco. Pinch the end


On one side, and ONLY one side, pleat the edge, pinching it to the flat side. So one pinch, move about 3/4 cm, another pinch, move 3/4 cm...continue. It's pleating, plain and simple. One side will remain flat. This will naturally create a crescent shape.

Keep carefully moving along the edge pleating until you come to the end, and which point, pinch it at the end, shutting it and pinch all along the top edge to make sure its sealed.

LOOK!!! I made a momo!

Lightly oil your steamer and lay the momos on them so that they are not touching. Steam for about 20-25 minutes over boiling water. Serve with chili sauce, soy sauce, and black vinegar if you have it!