Mongolia - part one

MONGOLIA: the land of mutton, yak’s curd biscuits and fermented mare’s milk.

Fodder for a bizarre food blog entry – yes – but how much can one take of mutton, stodgy rice, absurd dough strips parading as noodles and stale bread for lunch?
Exactly 14 days is how long, and not a minute more, I reckon. (On returning from the wilderness we fled to a Korean restaurant in Ulaanbaatar (UB) for dinner, to be comforted by our old staples – bibimbap and kimchi jjigae. Aaaah. Heaven).

A post on Mongol food is sure to be precise. Perhaps I could say it’s all about fatty mutton and end it there.
But then I would be forgetting all the other goodies mentioned above, wouldn’t I?
Because Monoglians are traditionally a nomadic people, they are never in one place long enough to grow fruit or vegetables. While some rice, pasta, and noodles have now been introduced in their diet – especially for families who are no longer nomadic – meals are still based around mutton and also dairy from their livestock. So that includes milk, yogurt and cream from sheep, horses and yaks.

(And yes, I have no idea how they don’t get scurvy.)

Already reeling from a few scary meals in the capital UB before our trip even began, our stomachs were not prepared for an onslaught of mutton.
I’d read stories of nomads feasting on boiled sheep’s parts fished from a bucket for dinner, and while I was willing to have a go, I wasn’t so sure if 14 days of it – and a prolonged bout of traveller’s diarrhoea – was for me.

While meals of not much more than mutton is no doubt the case for many Mongolians, our meals were a slightly watered down version for the tourists, I’m sure. I didn’t mind, and it still gave me enough fodder for that bizarre food blog entry (or three) I was sure to write.

Dried yak's curd biscuits, pictured during our stay in the Gobi desert.

Our first foray into the food of the nomads was with a round of biscuits (not the ones pictured) made from dried yak’s curds, smeared with yak’s butter, and some fermented mare’s milk called “airag”.

Phew. Nothing could prepare the palate. Perhaps I should have been practicing how to accept their offerings graciously and then nibble like a mouse while keeping a smile plastered on my face.
After that first taste the biscuit – though small in size – seemed ginormous. Surely there was no way one person could eat their way through it and survive?

It was hard, dry and curdy – difficult to explain except to say if you left some off milk to dry in the bottom of a carton for a few days and then scraped it up and baked it, you might be halfway there.
But then of course it was yak’s milk, so you really wouldn’t have the full effect.
It was much more edible with a scoop of yak’s butter, which was a slightly sweet grainy brew, halfway between butter and cream – an overbeaten butter, perhaps.

The airag took things to a new level, though some in our group of six quite enjoyed it and had multiple glasses – partly due to the fact that each time they finished their glass, it was re-filled again and again.
Still with a grumbling stomach from UB, I managed only a small sip. It was a thin, watery milk with a sour, slightly fizzy tang that made your lips curl. The locals love it.

A little later was dinner, perhaps the scariest on our trip.
After sitting and staring at us for a while – and after we had made some stammering attempts to communicate with a phrasebook – the very inquisitive Mongolian lady cooked up a big pot of doughy strips with chunks of mutton and a few bits of potato. She also managed to sell us a couple old semi-dried fish caught from the nearby lake.

To call them noodles would be an insult to the Chinese, I think. They appeared to be simply flour and water rolled into a pancake and then chopped into strips to resemble noodles, but had none of the light, slippery texture of noodles. They were heavy and dry and incredibly bland. Each plateful weighed a tonne. It almost made me want some airag to wash it down with.

Lunch in a township was always the same. Keep in mind, everything with mutton.
There was goulash, “beefshteak”, mutton cutlet which was really just the same as beefshteak, a sad-looking wilted cabbage salad, steamed mutton dumplings (“bootz”) and deep-fried mutton pancakes (“kuurshuur”).

But that’s for part two.
I’m just about to run along to another Korean eatery (of which there are a lot of in UB) to quench my muttoned-out, stodgy-carbed-out appetite.

I think from now on I’ll just save the Mongolian food for the blog.

Edit: please check our Flickr badge, located on the right of your screen, for more Mongolia photos.