Goen means cucumber and hogay means salad, and the dish looks so much like a Greek salad that the resemblance is the first thing anyone notices: cucumber, tomato, onion and a crumbly white farm cheese that behaves almost exactly like feta. What separates them is everything added after. Fistfuls of fresh chilli, coriander, spring onion and ground thingey, the wild Sichuan pepper that grows on the hillsides here, turn a cooling salad into something that tingles and burns while staying cold. It is one of the lightest things on a Bhutanese table and it exists to sit beside the heavy cheese stews rather than to compete with them. In central Bhutan it turns up at breakfast, heaped over a bowl of fried rice, which is a farmer’s meal rather than a delicate one.
INGREDIENTS
- 1 large cucumber
- 2 medium tomatoes (cut into wedges)
- 1 red onion (thinly sliced)
- 3 green chillies (finely sliced)
- 3 spring onions (sliced)
- a large handful of coriander (chopped)
- 120 g feta (rinsed and crumbled)
- 1 tsp ground Sichuan peppercorns
- 1 tsp dried chilli flakes
- 1 tbsp mustard oil
- 1 tsp salt
METHOD
- Peel the cucumber, halve it lengthways and scrape the seeds out with a teaspoon. Cut each half into 2cm chunks on the diagonal.
- Put the cucumber, tomatoes and onion in a wide bowl. Scatter over the salt and the ground peppercorns and turn them through.
- Add the green chillies, spring onions and coriander.
- Crumble the feta over the top and sprinkle on the chilli flakes.
- Pour over the mustard oil and mix with clean hands until everything is coated but the cheese is still in visible pieces.
- Serve immediately, alongside a cheese stew and red rice, or heaped over fried rice for breakfast.