Buuz

Ingredients

• Flour600 g
• Water280 ml
• Mutton — chopped by hand800 g
• Mutton fat150 g
• Onion2
• Garlic4 clove
• Salt and pepperto taste

Salt and spices grow more slowly than the rest: doubling a dish does not double the pepper.

Weight converts to ounces and volume to cups. Grams of flour are not turned into cups, because that depends on how tightly it is packed.

Method

1. 1

   Knead a stiff dough from the flour, water and salt and rest it under film for forty minutes.

   50 min

2. 2

   Chop the mutton and fat by hand into pieces the size of a pea.

   25 min

3. 3

   Mix the meat with the finely chopped onion, garlic, salt, pepper and a quarter cup of water.

   8 min

4. 4

   Roll ten-centimetre rounds, leaving the middle thicker than the edges.

   20 min

5. 5

   Put a spoon of filling in and pleat the edges around, leaving an opening at the top.

   25 min

6. 6

   Grease the steamer rack with fat and set the buuz on it, not touching one another.

   6 min

7. 7

   Steam eighteen minutes. The dough turns translucent and broth collects inside.

   20 min

About the dish

The meat is chopped with a knife rather than minced. Mincer mince gives a dense uniform filling; what is prized in buuz is the juiciness of separate pieces of fat.

Onion and garlic go in sparingly: a Mongolian filling is almost without spices — salt, onion and plenty of mutton fat. Everything else is considered surplus.

They are sealed on top with a small opening left. Steam escapes through it so the dumpling does not burst, and the same opening keeps the juices inside rather than in the steamer.

Worth knowing

• — The middle of the wrapper has to be thicker: it carries the weight of the filling and the broth, and a thin base tears.
• — They are eaten by hand, bitten at the side and the broth drunk first. Piercing a buuz with a fork loses everything it was made for.
• — They freeze raw and are steamed from frozen with five minutes added. Mongolian families make them by the hundred before the lunar new year.

Nutrition

Per serving at the base yield, calculated from the ingredients rather than measured in a lab.

Calories

620 kcal

Protein

30 g

Fat

34 g

Carbs

48 g

More from Mongolia

• Tsuivan — Home-made noodles steamed directly over the meat, then tossed through it.