Locomotoring

Summer of 2009, we were in Leh and Thikse was one of the first monastery we had visited. Imagine my surprise when I caught a glimpse of Thikse again, this time in Berkeley. This was another gem of a finding at the Cultured Pickle Shop.

Cultured Pickle had a few books at the serving table. And one of them was Elysian Kitchens. It caught my eye and I flipped through the recipes. I came across the poppy seed tsampa pancakes with apricot syrup, a recipe from the monks of Thikse monastry. I could not be more intrigued!

A little research into tsampa revealed that it is purple barley that is first roasted in hot sand (like popcorn served by roadside vendors in India) and then ground into flour. I have been buying purple barley from Azure Standard. I decided to do stove top roasting followed by home mill grinding. It was a pleasant surprise to watch, or more correctly stated, smell, the humble barley transform into a delightfully nutty and fragrant flour. We also make small batch apricot jam every year so that was handy as well. I have since made several batches of the pancake. Elysian Kitchens recipe suggests using 100% barley flour – I added beaten egg whites, a trick I learnt when making buckwheat pancakes to compensate for low gluten content of the barley flour. And apricot always reminds us of truckking in Ladakh! A couple of our 2009 blogs on Thiksey are, Kashmir – on not bus-ing across Leh and Garlicky nuns, Cream of Spanish and other adventures.