Here are some answers to questions people have emailed to us. One great way to ask us questions that is helpful to everyone is to ask it on our Facebook page and we can answer it there.
Is there any plan to make your cookbook into a normal paper book? If you plan to make it into a hard-copy normal book, I would like to buy a copy – but I do not like to read e-books.
Thanks for asking about this. At the moment, our only plan is to make the ebook available on Amazon soon. We would like to make a paper book, but due to all the images in the book, it would be very expensive to buy. Did you know that when you get the Tibetan Home Cooking ebook, that it comes as a PDF file which you can print? We have printed ours out and use it in the kitchen like that. All the best to you and thank you for your support!
Hello, I love the Nya Phing bean thread noodles with salmon and greens on the menu at Tsampa in Manhattan but can’t find a recipe so that I can make it at home. I don’t know enough to know if it’s a well known dish or not but if you have the recipe or if it’s in your e-book, I would love to know how to find it.
The Nya Phing sounds great, but that isn’t a common Tibetan dish, and was created probably by the chefs at that restaurant. Tibetans don’t traditionally eat fish — it has only begun to be done in exile communities. That said, Tibetans in the US anyway have begun to become more health conscious and eat some fish, and of course some people just take to it :-) Here’s a tiny bit more info on the topic, a post about “knowing your tibetan food.“
If you do get a recipe, let us know, it would be cool to give our readers a view of some Tibetan “fusion” recipes :-)
Help! Is there any possible way to estimate the nutritional makeup of momos?? I LOVE the beef dumplings a local Tibetan restaurant has as one of their offerings at the annual outdoor “Taste of…” here…. They come two to an order – and I eventually have two orders, after seeing what all else is on offer. It’s the wrapper that I can’t estimate – and, on the diet, one starch item should be no more than 15g carbs / 80 calories.
On Sparkpeople.com, which has a lot of nutritional info in their food tracker section, there are two listings for momos. No info for beef, unfortunately. Also, we can’t vouch for the accuracy, but maybe this helps:
Chicken momo: 1 dumpling: 57 calories, 7g carbs, 4g fat, 3g protein
Veg momo: 1 dumpling: 78 calories, 10 g carbs, 3g fat, 3g protein.
Good luck to you.
What can I use to replace the droma for my dresil if I can’t get droma?
Instead of droma, you could use raisins instead, since there is really nothing exactly droma. Here in the US, Tibetans usually make dresil with just rice, butter, sugar and raisins, except on Losar, when we make it a little more special with nuts and other dried fruits.
When should you eat Dresil?
There is no special time to eat dresil, except on Tibetan New Year, when we eat it in the morning, but not necessarily like breakfast, since we have other food before it (see our Losar food posts). On other days than Losar, we eat dresil on special occasions and that could be any time of day or evening.
Where can I get Tsampa?
- Our friend Dhondup la, sells tsampa online at: http://www.tibetantsampa.com/
- We can also recommend buying from Ann at Purple Mountain Tsampa, who makes tsampa fresh to order from hull-less barley, a “whole food” barley grown without a hull, and nutritionally superior to “pearled” or “hulled barley.” Contact Ann at [email protected]
- If you are in the San Francisco Bay Area, our friend Samten la sells bags of tsampa from her Cafe Tibet restaurant in Berkeley, California. (2020 University, Berkeley, CA (510) 548-5553)
- More info about tsampa here >>
Where can I find Tibetan restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area?
Actually, there are surprisingly few, given the size of the community. Our go to is Cafe Tibet, run by our friend Samten la, on University Ave. in Berkeley. Her thentuk and shabalep are very good. The momos sometimes have pre-made wrappers, but we like her marscapone momos.
Cafe Tibet
2020 University Ave
(between Milvia St & Shattuck Ave)
Berkeley, CA 94704
(510) 548-5553
http://www.cafetibetberkeley.com
There is also Kathmandu Kitchen or something like that on Solano Avenue at the Berkeley/Albany border, which is run I think by Nepalis. Have been once and it was fine. Recently we tried a Nepali place at the corner of San Pablo and Solano Avenue, and they had very good chicken momos — fresh, nice. There’s a new organic veggie place called Potala Organic Kitchen or something like that on San Pablo, but haven’t been yet and reviews are decidedly mixed. Have noticed a couple of new places called “Himalayan” this or that, but haven’t tried yet.
All these are in the East Bay. One of our big favorites, not Tibetan, is Vik’s Indian Chaat in Berkeley down by the train tracks. Cheap and excellent.
Where can you get mung bean starch?
You can get it from Korean food stories. We looked for it in many Chinese stores but couldn’t find it. You can also use potato starch instead of mung bean.
What do Tibetans eat for breakfast?
Tibetans in Tibet and in exile eat quite differently for breakfast. In Tibet (or Central Tibet at least) Tibetans will often eat jamdu, which is a sort of porridge made from tsampa, with butter, sugar, dried cheese , tea and tsampa. So it is very similar to “pa” but much more liquidy, and more like porridge. (We have a video on how to make “pa” in our newsletter series which you can get free if you sign up on the website for the Tibetan Culture newsletter.) In Tibet, people also often eat balep korkun with their butter tea (two different versions, one of them slightly sweetened and one not. In Lhasa, the sweet ones have a red dot on them to tell you it is sweet.)
In exile, Tibetans are most likely to eat some kind of bread, with many variations depending on where they live. In our house, in Northern California, we eat Amdo bread, bagels, or oatmeal, for example, sometimes with a boiled egg, or a banana with peanut butter, which of course has nothing to do with Tibetan food :-) Others may have a Tibetan kind of hash browns, or numtrak balep, with hot sauce. We have recipes for several of these in the Tibetan Home Cooking ebook.
Are Tibetan sweets or breads sold commercially? I would like to send some to a friend in college in time for the Tibetan new year.
That’s a great question. We don’t know of anywhere that sells Tibetan bread or sweets commercially. Traditionally, there really aren’t many Tibetan sweets. If anyone knows of a good place to buy either of these, please let us all know!
What is “emma”?
Yerma, or Emma (Commonly called Szechuan pepper)
Tibetans often use this very tasty, tiny, slightly numbing and citrusy “pepper” in hot sauces, meat dishes and in trang tsel. It is commonly called Szechuan pepper, but is actually a fruit. You should experiment with very small quantities and grind the dried peppercorns very well with a mortar and pestle before using. Emma is sort of like Japanese wasabi in that you don’t want to get a big piece of it in one bite. The amounts we use in the recipes does not leave your mouth numb unless you happen to get a whole pod, which you can avoid by grinding the emma well and mixing the ground mixture well with the other ingredients. Look for dried “Szechuan” or “Sichuan” pepper or “prickly ash” in Asian food stores. We have not tried this shop so cannot give a recommendation, but we found emma for sale online here: http://www.savoryspiceshop.com/spices/pprcrnszech.html.
I heard of a dish called Fingsha from my friends from tibet … do you know anything about this dish or where i can find a recipe for it?
We do know this dish — pingsha. Ping means crystal noodles or clear noodles and sha means meat. The basic recipe is very similar to our shamdrey recipe in the Tibetan Home Cooking ebook, though this shamdrey recipe does not include the crystal noodles that you use for pingsha.
Can you give a recipe for homemade spicy lime sauce? Your film is beautiful.
We have to tell you honestly that we are complete failures at lime or lemon pickle making! :-) We tried it once and it tasted awful. Let us know if you find a good method.
Any suggestion for a vegetarian version of the momo burger?
We haven’t tried this yet, but will keep that in mind and let you know. Maybe portobello mushrooms and cheese? If anyone has made this, let us know!
Hello! I’m from Brazil, and my mom is crazy (in a good way) about the Tibetan cause and does all this campaigning all the time, so when I saw the Momo recipe I thought it might be something awesome to make for her one of these days. I have a question though, how many dumplings does the recipe make, and how many people does it serve? Thank you so much for taking the time to answer and good luck guys!
It’s so nice to hear from you and how you are kindly thinking of making momos for your activist mom :-) The recipe on the site makes about 35 to 50 momos (depending on the size of your dough circles), which would be enough for 4 to 5 people. Let us know how the momo making goes for you :-) (They taste truly great!)
I am considering buying your eCookbook. I think I would print it out to use it away from my computer. Would you let me know if it is sized for A4 paper or Letter sized paper?
Thanks so much for your interest in our cookbook. It is sized for letter-sized paper. I hope you are able to enjoy it.
Firstly, a big THANK YOU for YoWangDu. I love the postings, recipes, insights and all. I write regarding the use of canola oil in the latest recipe. I don’t know if it’s because canola oil lends a particular taste that is vital to the recipe, but so far I’ve been hearing that vegetable oils like canola, soy and corn are not as good as they’re touted to be: often genetically modified and although they are low in fat, their being industrially processed causes them to become denatured and not easily assimilated by the body. I’m including a couple of links to what I’ve come across here:
http://www.naturalnews.com/026365_oil_canola.html
http://www.westonaprice.org/know-your-fats/good-fats-bad-fats-separating-fact-from-fiction
http://www.naturalnews.com/022313.html
Thank you so much for making us aware of this issue. We have been using canola because we thought it was a good low-fat cooking oil, but are beginning to learn that this is probably not true. We are experimenting now with peanut oil and coconut oil.
Take me back to the Tibetan Food main page >>
By Lobsang Wangdu
