[Jeff]

[graywolf]

I've been curious about tsampa since reading about in "The Snow Leopard", and I might order some just to try it.

[Frosty]

Well, this thread inspired me to soak some barley and roast it up! Have the last batch roasting on the fire this morning and will grind some of it up after plowing out the barnyard.

[contour5]

Is this a new trend of some sort? I found the Tibetan-style food in Ladakh to be seriously bland and greasy. The cuisine developed as the result of an extremely limited agricultural base- not a whole lot of crops can be farmed above 12000 feet. A lot of the Tibetan diet is based on various combinations of barley and yak butter. Some of it has a distinctly rancid taste. Chang, or barley beer, tastes as rancid as pulque. Perfectly functional as an alcohol delivery system, but pretty tough to choke down if you're not used to it. Toasted barley actually has a rather pleasant aroma and taste, so if you were to create an ersatz Tsampa using fresh, conventional butter, you might be able to come up with an edible sort of porridge.

[Malachai Constant]

you do not go to Tibet or Nepal for the food!

[Frosty]

I ground up the tsampa this morning and found a recipe for tsampa snack balls at yowangdu.com. I made the cocoa balls with the tsampa, pecans, honey, butter, vanilla and coffee as per the recipe and then added some cayenne and navy rum. Pretty tasty. they could probably take some dries cherries, cranberries or blueberries too...

[Frosty]

Made some dashi miso soup and added tsampa to it. Still was flavorful, I had paste but for packing would try a dry miso. Will have to look for some at grocery.