Tsampa

Hordeum vulgare · ngamphey · roasted barley flour

Flour you can eat without a fire.

What it is

Tsampa is barley roasted in hot sand or a dry pan until it darkens and smells nutty, then milled. Because the grain is cooked before grinding, the flour needs no further cooking: stir it into tea, butter or water and it is food. That single property fed the Tibetan plateau, where fuel is scarce and a household might light the stove once a day.

Where it comes from

The Tibetan plateau and everywhere its culture reached, from Ladakh through Nepal's high valleys to Bhutan. Barley is the only cereal that ripens reliably above the rice and wheat lines, so tsampa is what altitude leaves a household to eat.

What it's called

Tsampa (Tibetan) · ngamphey (Ladakhi, for the barley in the mixed-flour version). Botanically Hordeum vulgare, usually a naked or hull-less barley.

In the kitchen

Kneaded by hand into salted butter tea until it forms a stiff ball eaten from the fingers, which is the everyday form. It also gets worked with water into a dough and boiled, as the Ladakhi paba, where barley is mixed with wheat, buckwheat and pulse flours in whatever proportion a household kept. Roast the flours before they meet water or the result tastes raw however long you boil it.

What we know about the claims

Barley is high in soluble fibre and the roasting does not change that. The more interesting claim is practical, not nutritional. Tsampa travels, keeps, needs no cooking and does not spoil, and it provisioned caravans and pilgrims for centuries on that basis.

Choosing and buying

Barley flour is sold by health food shops and online mills in the UK and by natural foods stores in the US, though it comes unroasted. Roast it yourself in a dry pan for six to eight minutes until it darkens a shade and smells nutty. Some Tibetan diaspora shops sell proper tsampa ready-roasted.