The Indian subcontinent · Volume 24, Nepal, Bhutan, Ladakh, Sikkim and Darjeeling

Momo

Name: Momo
Total time: 1 h
Yield: Makes about 20 dumplings
Cuisine: The High Himalaya
Ingredients: 300 g plain flour; about 150 ml water; 400 g minced meat (buffalo, mutton, chicken or pork, all traditional depending on place and community); 1 small onion, finely diced; 2 tbsp grated ginger and garlic; 1 tbsp soy sauce, or, more traditionally still, fermented soybean paste; a small handful chopped coriander; a pinch a pinch of timur; to taste salt, to taste; a splash a splash of water or stock; to taste tomato, garlic, chilli and timur

Pan-Himalayan, Tibet through Nepal, Bhutan, Ladakh, Sikkim and Darjeeling

Momo, pleated steamed dumplings with a spiced meat filling: a neat row of pleated, translucent-skinned dumplings on a round steamer tray, each crimped seam visible at the top, a small bowl of dark red.

Illustration

Time: 1 hour

Researched: Researched from 116 sources in the brief

The pan-Himalayan dumpling, claimed and cooked from Tibet through Nepal, Bhutan, Ladakh, Sikkim and Darjeeling alike, has become, almost by accident, the international shorthand for "food from this whole region," which is exactly why it belongs here rather than in any single sub-chapter: this is its home volume, and the good version and the bad version differ by a small number of controllable decisions, not by mystery.

Pan-Himalayan, Tibet through Nepal, Bhutan, Ladakh, Sikkim and Darjeeling

Nepal's own modern moment is a diaspora story more than a colonial one; Nepal was never formally colonised, and its food history has instead been shaped by a long tradition of Gurkha military service abroad and, more recently, by labour migration to the Gulf and beyond. Commentator Sujeev Shakya has argued, in the Kathmandu Post, that Nepal's mid-twentieth-century opening to hotel tourism trained a generation of Nepalis in international cuisine and technique, technique that the diaspora waves of the 1990s onward then carried abroad and, increasingly, back home again; that momo has become the accidental global shorthand for "Nepali food" despite not being exclusively Nepali in origin; and that food has become a unifying identity marker across Nepali-speaking communities regardless of the passport they carry, Bhutanese-Nepali refugees among them. This chapter does not attempt to tell that refugee history in full: it touches Bhutan and Nepal both, it is genuinely significant, and it fell outside what this research pass could verify to the sourcing standard the rest of this book holds itself to, so it is named here as a real gap rather than either asserted without evidence or silently ignored. What is well evidenced is the effect on the food itself: dishes once coded as lekh, highland, poor, dhindo and gundruk chief among them, have been rehabilitated inside a generation into markers of urban and diaspora authenticity, the same globalisation loop playing out at home that it plays out abroad.

Read the history

As tradition built it

Makes about 20 dumplings. About 1 hour, plus resting.

Ingredients

For the dough

300 g plain flour
about 150 ml water

For the filling

400 g minced meat (buffalo, mutton, chicken or pork, all traditional depending on place and community)
1 small onion, finely diced
2 tbsp grated ginger and garlic
1 tbsp soy sauce, or, more traditionally still, fermented soybean paste
a small handful chopped coriander
a pinch a pinch of timur
to taste salt, to taste
a splash a splash of water or stock

For the dipping sauce

to taste tomato, garlic, chilli and timur

Method

The dough

Make a plain dough from the flour and water, kneaded smooth, and rest it, covered, for at least 30 minutes, the rest relaxing the gluten enough to roll thin without tearing.

The filling

Combine the minced meat with the diced onion, grated ginger and garlic, soy sauce or fermented soybean paste, coriander, timur and salt, working in a splash of water or stock until the mixture is loose and slightly wet rather than dry.

Shaping and cooking

Roll the rested dough into small rounds, thinner at the edge than the centre, spoon in the filling, and pleat closed into the traditional crescent or round-topped shape.
Steam over rapidly boiling water 8 to 10 minutes until the dough is translucent and the filling cooked through.
Serve with the dipping sauce of tomato, garlic, chilli and timur, and, in Ladakh's Buddhist kitchens specifically, sometimes in a clear broth rather than dry.

What a modern chef changes

A precisely hydrated dough and a basted filling

Rung 1

Method

First, hydrate the dough precisely, weighing water to flour at a fixed 50 per cent ratio rather than by feel, and roll each wrapper to a measured, even thickness with a pasta roller, edges thinned by hand afterwards, removing the single biggest source of variation between a good momo and a stodgy one.
Second, build the filling around a proper stock reduction rather than plain water, a rich, gelatinous reduced bone stock folded through the meat cold so it melts during steaming and bastes the filling from within, the same soup-dumpling logic used elsewhere in the wider region applied honestly to a Himalayan filling.
Third, finish a portion of the batch not by steaming but by pan-searing the base after steaming, a hot, dry pan for the last 90 seconds, for a textural contrast between soft top and crisp base within the same dumpling.
Fourth, make the dipping sauce's chilli oil from scratch with fresh, not dried, dalle khursani where obtainable, infused slowly at low temperature to preserve its fruit character rather than only its heat.

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