Tsuivan

Ingredients

• Flour400 g
• Water180 ml
• Mutton — in strips500 g
• Onions2
• Carrots2
• Cabbage250 g
• Potato2
• Mutton fat or oil80 g
• 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 thirty minutes.

   40 min

2. 2

   Roll it thin, brush with fat, roll it up and cut across into half-centimetre strips.

   20 min

3. 3

   Separate the strips by hand and spread them on a board so they do not stick.

   8 min

4. 4

   Sear the mutton in the fat over a high heat, then add the onion, carrot, potato and cabbage.

   15 min

5. 5

   Add a cup of water, season and bring it to the boil.

   5 min

6. 6

   Lay the noodles in an even layer over the meat without stirring, cover and hold twenty minutes on a low heat.

   22 min

7. 7

   Take the lid off, add the garlic and toss everything together. Serve at once.

   5 min

About the dish

The noodles are never boiled. They are laid in a layer over the stewing meat and cooked in its steam, taking up the fat and the smell — that is the whole difference between tsuivan and ordinary fried noodles.

The dough is rolled, brushed with fat, rolled up and cut across. The fat between the layers keeps the noodles from fusing in the steam.

There are few vegetables in the classic version: onion, carrot, sometimes cabbage. Tsuivan is steppe food, where vegetables were scarce and meat and flour were not.

Worth knowing

• — Do not lift the lid in the first fifteen minutes. Steam lost means dry noodles on top and raw ones in the middle.
• — Use little water: it should be gone by the end. Too much turns tsuivan into noodle soup.
• — Toss it at the very end, once and gently. Steamed noodles are fragile and break with extra handling.

Nutrition

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

Calories

660 kcal

Protein

32 g

Fat

28 g

Carbs

72 g

More from Mongolia

• Buuz — Large steamed dumplings of chopped mutton. The centrepiece of the Mongolian lunar new year.