Tibetan cooking is the food of a high, cold, dry country, and it is built on a short list of ingredients: barley, yak and mutton, dairy in every form, winter vegetables, and a set of strong flavours - chilli, garlic, wild herbs and the fermented notes that come with living where fresh produce is scarce. It is far more varied than the dumpling-and-tea picture outside Tibet suggests, and a cooking class in Lhasa is a good way to understand what the plateau eats and why.
What you make
The standard class covers three things. Momos: the filled dumplings eaten across the Himalayas, with a minced meat or potato and cheese filling, folded into the crescent and pleated shapes that take practice. Thenthuk: hand-pulled noodle pieces, torn from a flattened strip of dough and dropped into a broth with meat, radish and greens, which is the plateau's everyday soup. And tsampa: roasted barley flour, worked with butter tea into a paste and eaten by hand - the oldest food in Tibet and still the one carried by travellers. Some classes add a yak meat dish and a chilli-and-sichuan-pepper condiment.
Butter tea, properly
The class is also the place to learn butter tea, which visitors often dislike on first tasting and come to appreciate later. Brick tea is boiled hard, then churned with yak butter and salt in a tall wooden cylinder until it emulsifies into a thick, savoury liquid served hot in small bowls. Sweet tea - boiled with milk and sugar, the version popular in Lhasa's tea houses - is the other staple, and the two together explain the whole day's drinking on the plateau.
Practical notes
Classes run in a few guesthouses and small cooking studios in Lhasa's old town, usually for two to four hours and with a market visit attached; book ahead, since numbers are small. Foreign visitors need a Tibet Travel Permit arranged through a licensed agency, and a class is normally slotted into a guided itinerary rather than booked independently. Take altitude into account and do not schedule a class on your first day. If you have dietary restrictions, say so in advance - the traditional recipes lean heavily on meat and dairy.
