After a 2000km loop through Mongolia, we got a good taste of the local food.
In Ulanbaatar, you can find all sorts of „Western“ foods, but leave the city behind for the beautiful countryside and you get to know real Mongolian food. So let us take you on a short culinary tour…
The majority of people in the countryside are nomads that live in felt tents, so called gers, and they only eat what they have – which is herds of animals (camels, horses, cows, sheep, goats, yaks). After visiting many gers on our trip, it feels safe to say that the lifestyle and customs of the nomads are surprisingly unvaried. The day is typically spent by milking the animals and processing the milk into a variety of dairy products – which we got offered in random combinations at any of the many gers we visited along our way.
First of all, there is „tse“, tea with very little tea but a lot of milk in it, sometimes also contains some melted butter and salt. It’s drunken in abundance all day long, and whenever you enter a ger, there will be a pot of steaming tse waiting for you.
Another popular drink is „airag“, fermented horse milk. Slightly alcoholic and not as disgusting as it may sound (even though it takes a bit to get used to the taste of sour milk that bubbles like coca cola). The nomads will refill your cup endlessly from a huge barrel of airag if you don’t politely stop them. There is also a very tasty yoghurt called „tarag“, and homemade „masla“, a mixture between butter and cream, which is eaten pure or piled high onto the sparsely available bread. The nomads also make a type of cheese called „aaruul“, which they dry on the roof of the ger. It tastes a bit like parmesan – quite good actually.
In terms of proper meals, meat is often the only ingredient. Usually it’s mutton meat – and yes, it does taste a bit like old sheep. The national ‚fast food‘ you get everywhere is „chushuur“, fried pancakes filled with minced mutton meat, or „buuz“, dumplings with mutton. The meat contains a lot of fat, is fried and it can be a bit intense if you get it for breakfast, lunch and dinner. We had a few outstanding meals though, for example the national dish „Chorchog“. Our jeep driver and his family cooked it for us in their ger. For this dish the meat is cooked in a sealed pot over the fire with some airag and stones that have been heated in the fire before and are put directly on the meat to have heat from inside and outside. Before you start eating, the hot and greasy stones are passed to everyone, and are tossed around until they have cooled down – apparently the hot stones have a calming influence on you (which seems needed as all the cooking and eating was not a quiet affair at all). We were lucky enough to have this special dish prepared twice for us – the other time it was prepared with a deer that the nomad family we visited had just shot…
In the countryside, the only places to get food except for inviting yourself to some random nomads‘ ger is to visit a „guanz“, a kind of restaurant in a ger. You enter and they will start cooking for you. Since the oven (which is heated with dried animal dung) is always in the middle, you can watch how the food is prepared. A great dish we had in a guanz is „tsuivan“, for which freshly made pasta dough is toasted a bit on the hot oven and then cut into fine stripes, to be mixed with – guess what – fried mutton.
The astonishing thing for us is that the Mongolians don’t seem to eat any vegetables or fruit, just milk and meat. The closest we got to some veggies was a fried onion and a potato in the last two weeks…
So the first thing we did upon our return to Ulaanbaatar was to go to a market and hunt for some overpriced fresh vegetables to make a huge colourful bowl of salad ;-) Now that the vitamin levels are replenished, we are ready for tomorrow’s special: mutton.
