Sukuti

shakam · sukhayeko masu

A winter's protein, hung from the rafters.

What it is

Sukuti is meat cut into strips, salted, sometimes rubbed with turmeric and chilli, and hung to dry in cold dry mountain air until it is hard enough to store for months. Buffalo and goat in Nepal, beef and yak in Bhutan, where it is called shakam. It is not jerky. No sugar goes near it, no smoke and no marinade. Soaked back to life it goes ragged and fibrous instead of tender, and the dishes are built around that texture.

Where it comes from

Everywhere in the Himalaya that has a cold dry season and no refrigeration, which is to say everywhere in this zone. An animal slaughtered in autumn had to last, and hanging it in the air was the method the climate made available.

What it's called

Sukuti (Nepali) · shakam (Dzongkha) · sukhayeko masu, literally dried meat. The Bhutanese and Nepali versions differ in the animal more than the method.

In the kitchen

Soak whole sukuti in warm water for fifteen to twenty minutes and squeeze it out before it goes near the pan, because underoaked sukuti stays leathery and no amount of dressing fixes the chew. Pound the softened strips to loosen the fibres, then fry them briefly so the edges crisp. It gets tossed hot into a sadeko with mustard oil, lemon and raw onion, or simmered dry with daikon and whole dried chillies as the Bhutanese shakam paa.

What we know about the claims

Dried and salted, so the sodium is high. There is nothing medicinal claimed for it and nothing needs to be. It is preserved meat in a place where that was the only kind available for half the year.

Choosing and buying

Whole dried buff or mutton sukuti is sold by Nepali grocers online and needs soaking; ready-to-eat packs are also sold and need none. Supermarket beef jerky is not a substitute, being sugar-cured and smoked quite differently. For the Bhutanese shakam, plain biltong is the nearest supermarket thing, since it is air-dried and salt-cured instead of sugared. Buy it plain, slice it thick and soak it for an hour.