Tuva eat · Eating in Tuva
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Eating in Tuva
Eating in Tuva
Pine kernels: if the Tyvan stone-pine ('kedr') kernels were good enough as a snack for the Soviet cosmonauts, they'll probably be good enough for anyone.
As a guest in a village home you may be witness to the slaughtering of the sheep to be cooked in your honour. It will be killed humanely in the traditional way, as Ghengis Khan decreed: no blood must touch the Mongols' earth. The animal is calmly turned so that a small incision can be made with a very sharp knife. Immediately a careful hand is inserted, finds the heart and cuts off the blood circulation.
Absolutely all the edible parts are then prepared and cooked, to be presented in separate heaps on a large flat dish. The guest is then asked to cut a piece of each kind for each person, using the sharp knife against a wishbone-shaped 'anvil' made from the breastbone. After that everyone helps themselves with their own knife, or sharing. Food is eaten with the fingers. A clear, derived broth is served to be sipped from the bowl.
A very traditional food, 'dalgan', can be hard to find nowadays unless you fall in love with a rural Tyvan grandmother. It is like Tibetan 'tsampa', rolled oats toasted to taste on hot sand in a pot over the fire, sieved to separate, and pounded to a coarse meal. This is then formed into a ball using salt tea or kumiss as the binder.
Pretty steamed mutton dumplings, 'booza', also fried as 'khoorshur'.
Although Tyva is literally the furthest away from the ocean it's possible to get, in English the source of a favourite winter snack or desert is called sea buckthorn. Able to survive in salty deserts, its tangy orange berries are delicous when frosted, and eaten with sugar topping. They also produce an oil, which Tyvans keep in a bottle for use as a skin ointment.
Try chili-hot Korean food at their ethnic restaurants.
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Tuva Travel Guide from Wikitravel. Many thanks to all Wikitravel contributors. Text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0, images are available under various licenses, see each image for details.