ROAD BLOG AHEAD

Even writing here I am so behind. I’ve been posting to my other, more intimate blog these past few weeks and not copying things over here. I might at some point, but for now I’m just going to forge ahead.

I’ve been sick for almost 2 weeks. What should have been a head cold turned into pneumonia and I’ve been flat on my back. Or rather, propped up on pillows. I am now thoroughly bored with both being sick and writing about being sick so I’ll find something else to talk about.

I’m making tsampa. Maybe that’s worth writing about. Tsampa is pretty much the Tibetan national dish. If you can call it a “dish”. What it is is flour or meal made from roasted barley. There’s a lot of different ways to eat it and it keeps just about forever, provides lots of nutrition, is portable, storable, etc. It can be mixed with yogurt, with butter, with tea, with cheese. I like it mixed with butter and chura, the Tibetan equivalent of parmesan, only smellier. Lots of butter, lots of chura until it’s a kind of grainy lump. Then you eat it and it’s quite tasty and very very filling. A little goes a long way, but then it’s designed to keep you going for 9 month long, zero minus sixty degree winters in the Himalayas, so it sticks to your ribs and keeps you warm and energized. It’s not what you’d call ideal food for sunny California.

So anyway, being able to make tsampa is a very important skill when you’re playing den mother to Tibetans. Years and years ago, the first time Lama Wangdor came to visit after we were together, Lena showed me how to do tsampa using a wok and a kind of improvised beater to stir/roast the barley over an open flame. Of course then you are supposed to take your roasted barley in big sacks down to the local mills and have them grind it for you. Sure. I’ll just hop right down to the old mill stream… We’d experimented then and discovered that the only thing that really ground it to the right consistency (similar to a stone-ground whole wheat flour) was this ancient food processor I’d originally bought in 1980 to make babyfood out of table scraps when Roni was born. It made about a cup at a time, but it was pretty decent tsampa.

Fast forward about eight years and Rimpoche was coming back for another visit and Lena had taken up studying herbalism. My decrepit food processor had pretty much bit the dust when it was pressed into service attempting to grind smoked dong quai - akin to grinding hunks of petrified wood. The new models of food processors didn’t grind fine enough. We tried a coffee grinder and it was thoroughly inadequate to the task, not to mention waaaaay too small. Hmmm.

But wait. I remembered that there was an attachment for the Kitchen Aid line of stand mixers that just might do the trick. Actually there’s probably a Kitchen Aid attachment that will do just about anything and everything - I swear by Kitchen Aid!!! It was a grain mill - a heavy metal device powered by the strong motor on the mixer designed to grind grain into flour for cooking and baking. Not cheap - I think mine was close to $100 even back then, added to the hefty $300 price tag of the mixers themselves. But it worked! Not only that, but it let me adjust the coarseness of the grind depending on how I wanted my tsampa and what it was being used for.

Oh. Right. One of the most important uses for tsampa - next to feeding a hungry population above the snow line - is to make the ritual offering figures called tormas that are used in ceremonies. Tormas are, in a way, food for deities, spirits, demons, etc. They are also art forms - sometimes being truly elaborate and intricate sculptures made of dough that has been formed primarily of fine-ground tsampa and butter. They are decorated with butter - flowers of butter, curls of butter, horns and whorls and swirls of cold, hard butter. Remember - this is a form that developed in very very (did I say very) cold places. And often the sculptures are finished by being coated with a thick layer of… butter. Only the butter is first dyed bright red. But the making of the red butter is another story unto itself. Suffice it to say I can make red butter too.

We go through a lot of tsampa during a visit if there are ceremonies requiring tormas - which of course there always are. I tend to make it in five pound batches and usually make several batches while Rimpoche is visiting. It gets eaten for breakfast. It gets eaten for a midnight snack. It gets shared with guests in order to have the fun of sharing something new and unusual with people. Or to watch and giggle at the expression on their faces the first time they forget, inhale at the wrong moment and end up with a snoot full of tsampa. There’s an art, not only to making the stuff, but to eating it safely. Tibetan children learn that art before they can walk. Westerners learn the hard way

One thing we discovered is that a sack of tsampa makes a really fine gift when Rimpoche goes visiting other Tibetans who have emigrated to the States. It’s a taste of home. People import the stuff. We’ve been offered small bags of tsampa that was made in Lhasa and smuggled out of Tibet. Ten years ago especially, it just wasn’t made here. Nobody had figured out how. Or something. Except me. By trial and error I’d also improved on the roasting process, speeding it up immensely without sacrificing flavor by doing it in batches in a low oven on heavy commercial baking sheets. It was a trick I’d learned when brewing our own beer and roasting barley for that. I thought “hmmm, might this work for making tsampa?” And indeed it did. The trick isn’t just in putting it in a shallow layer on a heavy pan in the right temp oven - it also requires pre-moistening the barley to the right degree - not wet or even really damp, just rehydrating it a bit over the dried out dessicated condition it arrives in commercially. I just use ordinary cheap pearl barley from Safeway. It comes in pound bags at about a buck a pound. People have tried using fancy unhulled, organic barley. They’ve used seed barley. They’ve used fancy brewing barley. Uh uh. Safeway. The cheap stuff. Yeah it’s been sitting awhile. That’s why you rehydrate it. I pour about five pounds of it into a huge mixing bowl and then wet my hands and run it through the barley. Keep wetting my hands and sifting barley until it’s just slightly moistened so that the grains cling to my fingers a bit. Then I leave it sit for 4-8 hours or overnight to absorb the bit of moisture. It’s not wet. You might not even know there’s any added water to look at it. But it makes all the difference. Then, when it’s roasted, it doesn’t turn into little hard pebbles. It gets tender. I roast it maybe 20 minutes in a 325 F oven or until it’s just the least bit pale browned. Cool and put it through the grain mill. Voila! Tsampa like Ama used to make!

I’m writing this because I got a call today from Chicago where Lena and Lama have been teaching the past few days. There’s a small Tibetan community there. A family is hosting Rimpoche and Lena and, when the local Tibetans got a look at my tsampa, apparently there was a mob scene and now they all want to know exactly how I do it - how I have managed to make quantities of the “real” stuff, authentic, using modern appliances and methods?!! Yeah my streamlining the roasting is good, but they could live with the old-fashioned wok roasting. It’s the grinding that has stymied everyone, the finding of a machine that will do it right - like the old stone mills back home!

I don’t suppose there’s quite enough demand that I could go into business making the stuff in bulk and selling it by mail order? Nah. Didn’t think so. So I’m happy to share my “secrets” with anyone who wants them. It’s kind of funny really, that this is one of those cultural things that got passed on to someone outside the culture who figured out how to do it with her modern “labor saving” equipment and now can pass that information back to people out of the original culture who no longer have their traditional methods available. One wonders just how many different skills and tricks have evolved and adapted to change that way over the many thousands of years of human history and migration? We sure are an adaptive species.