Food

The two main ingredients of food in Mongolia are meat and dough. There is an abundance of meat in Mongolia, although in recent years the price has been increasing. The type of meat that you can buy varies from place to place. In my town we can buy beef, mutton (sheep meat), some goat, and horse. In some parts of Mongolia you can buy camel and yak meat, too. The dough is simply made from flour and water. A variety of Mongolian foods are made with meat and dough (and occasional other ingredients).


Buuz, the kind of dumpling shown above (with a pickled salad), are made of meat, fat, onion, a little salt, and a little water wrapped in dough and then steamed.


Bansh, above, contain the same ingredients as buuz, but they are smaller and are pinched differently. Bansh are generally cooked in soup.

If you used the same ingredients again but made the dumpling flatter (sort of like a quesadilla) and fried it, it would be called huushuur. If you cut up the dough like fat noodles and stirfried some meat and root vegetables (carrots, turnips, potatoes) and then cooked it all together, it would be called Tsuivan. Tsuivan is my absolute favorite Mongolian food and is best when topped with a slightly spicy Russian ketchup.

Mongolians also eat a lot of soup, although, I should warn you that even vegetable soup in Mongolia must contain meat or it wouldn't be considered a real meal. Rice stirfried with meat and some root veggies is also a common meal.


Some of the different ethnic groups in Mongolia have different foods as well. One of my friends, who is a Buriat, served me this meal of horse intestines, white blood sausage, and beet salad.