Tibetan Food Part 3—Yak

Weeks ago, I talked a lot about Tibetan food, I talked about Tsampa, Tibetan sweet tea, Tibetan dumplings and Tibetan noodles. There is one thing I forgot to mention,  Tibetans are not vegetarians and meat is also their staple food. Animal husbandry is flourishing in Tibet, so the Tibetan eat their herds. Their two major animals are sheep and yak. Since sheep is a very normal animal I want to talk more about the yak.

Yak is special animal, which only lives on the altitude more than 3500 meters (11,483 ft.). It is a kind of cattle; unlike the other cattle, which live on a plain, yak has a very long hair. Black hair is the major color of yak, white hair yaks is very rare. Many tourists think white yak looks adorable, so Tibetans capture white yaks to rent them to the tourists and let them take picture with the white yaks. The black yak is for eating，transportation or some agricultural use. The meat of yak is very delicious and has special flavor. One of the popular cooking methods is the air-dried meat. To make that kind of meat, Tibetans will boil the meat and spices, and after the meat will be dried on the air to dehydrate it. This kind of cooking method can preserve the meat for longer time without a refrigerator. Tibetans also drink the yak milk and use that to make Tibetan butter and Tibetan yogurt. Every year at the beginning of July, Tibetans will celebrate a festival called Sho Dun, which is a festival about eating yak yogurt.

A cute white yak

Black yaks

Air-dried yak meat

Welcome to Tibetan and have a taste of the delicious yak.

བཀྲ་ཤིས་བདེ་ལེགས！Tashi delek!

‪YoWangdu Tibetan Culture

When I write my blog about the Tibetan culture, I need to do some research. Especially, I need to find the some English official translation of Tibetan culture, which is very hard for me. Fortunately, I found a YouTube channel called “YoWangduTibetan Culture”. Losar Wangdu created this channel to present Tibetan culture, which focuses on Tibetan food, Tibetan Buddhism and travel. When you open this site, you can find this channel is separated into three parts (Buddhism, Food, and travel) to illustrate Tibetan culture. Under each part there are plenty of videos. Viewers can watch these videos to learn about Tibetan culture. Meanwhile, these videos are made in English, which is very useful for me to find the correct translation and for foreigners to understand. For example, last week I wrote a blog about Tibetan food. I opened this site; there were 20 videos available. It is fast, informative and convenient. I found the video about how to make a Tsampa, and put this link to my blog to help readers have a better understanding of my blog. I really like this YouTube channel; it helped me a lot. If you want to learn more about Tibetan culture, you can also visit the site to explore your interests of the Tibetan world. Here is a instruction video for this channel.

བཀྲ་ཤིས་བདེ་ལེགས！Tashi delek! (That's a Tibetan, which means good luck.)

Tibetan food Part 2— a taste in Tibetan Café

When I stayed in Lhasa, I found there were lots of Tibetan Cafés near my hotel. And every time I passed by those Cafés, they were full of Tibetans. I was so curious about why these Cafés were so popular in Tibetan life. What’s the secret inside these Cafés? Thus, I decided to make an adventure to a Tibetan Café and find out why it was so attractive! 

I remember on my fifth day in Lhasa, I asked my father to go a Tibetan Café with me because other team members were not interested and still suffered with the altitude sickness. Since the Tibetan Café nearest to my hotel looked very popular, I chose to go there. When I went inside the Café, a kind Tibetan man used a not fluent Mandarin to ask me what I wanted. Actually, I had no idea about what I should order. So I asked him to give me some suggestions. Finally, I ordered a pot of Tibetan sweet tea, Tibetan dumplings and Tibetan noodles. I have to say they were so delicious that I ordered them again and ate them all.  

Here are some photos that I took of these foods, and I will explain how Tibetans made them.

       

The sweet tea is made of milk, black tea and sugar. The Tibetans will boil them together to keep the special favor.

As I said barley is the major crop in the Tibet plateau. This dumpling is made of barley flour and yak meat. I put some Tibetan pepper sauce on it because I love spicy food.

The noodles are also made of barley flour and yak bone soup. And on the plateau the water never boils, so it takes time to cook these noodles.

I finally found the secret inside the Tibetan Cafés: the delicious food!