What is Mongolian food like?

[question from John, Miguel, Sophie, Louisa, Annabel, Theodora and Ed]

As it doesn’t rain that much in Mongolia, and the winters are so cold, Mongolian people find it very difficult to grow vegetables and fruit. This means that most meals are based around other things. Over the last five weeks of my stay in Ulaanbaatar, I’ve mostly been eating meat. Mongolians definitely like to eat meat – it’s quite difficult to live here and be a vegetarian! They also like fatty foods. I suppose they eat a lot of fat so that they can be comfortable in the very cold winters.

The two most traditional Mongolian dishes are ‘hoshur’ and ‘buuz’.

Buuz are small dumplings filled with mutton and herbs. When eating them, one usually takes a small bite to get through the pastry, and then sucks out the juice from inside. Mongolians are very happy to make noise at the dinner table (it’s a sign of appreciation of the meal), so slurping is definitely allowed!


Hoshur are large flat pastries filled with steak and gravy. The best way to describe them is that they look a bit like flat cornish pasties. Whenever I want to treat my myself I go to a local café and buy some hoshur – I love them!



I was lucky enough to see how both were made when I stayed with a Mongolian family. In the photos below you can see Chimgee and Bud making them:


Cutting and rolling the dough

Filling the dough circles up with meat & herbs

Closing up the dough parcels. The buuz are ready to cook!

Mongolians wash all this food down with a variety of drinks. The most popular is called ‘suutei tse’, which is a very milky tea. Suutei tse is prepared in a big cauldron which is filled with milk. Once the milk is boiling some tea and spices are added, together with some butter. The result is a very warming and quite rich drink. I quite like it, but my fellow British friends aren’t too sure about it… Adults like to drink vodka and a special drink called ‘airag’. Airag is made from fermented horse’s milk. Whilst I like to eat and drink almost anything, this was a bit too much for me – it tasted like vinegar. Mongolians seem to love it though!

Some of the perhaps more unusual things that Mongolians eat are:

Camels,
Horses,
Sheep’s heads!

I hope to try all of them before I leave, so I’ll tell you how they taste in the future…