Wintry Namkeen Chai from Dehradun
Sanskriti Bist tastes Garhwali tea for the first time, a fascinating mountain tradition in Dehradun, where tea is made with yak milk, salt & mutton fat.
Dehradun is beautiful in the winter. The windows are filled with flowers, and the trees are still green. Through the pandemic, the locals really took to growing vegetables, and now you can find garlic and turmeric on the sidewalk. My neighbour's house is also like this. A home dipped in vibrant blue, surrounded by yellow flowering mustard, and gorgeous pink bougainvillea that welcomes you in.
I slowly made friends with them over the course of lockdown. What started as namastes over the terrace, slowly grew into questions about the spices they were drying in their verandah, to the cuisine of her younger days here. Garhwali food is more than just phaanu, and I’ve come to learn this while talking to dadi and Usha, her daughter-in-law. Although phaanu is delicious, and one of the first dishes that pop up in a google search on Garhwali food, there is plenty of food here, that seems to be slowly getting lost.
“Have you had namkeen chai?” Usha asked me one afternoon, as she was made ginger tea. I had come by to gather some fresh mustard from their garden. They had clearly just woken from an afternoon nap, a holy winter tradition in Dehradun. Dadi was still wrapped in layers of woollens, seated in the living room.
“Namkeen chai is made with yak milk and salt, but there are so many different varieties — there is ghee namkeen chai, and also my favourite, made of mutton ki charbi (mutton fat) that I haven’t had in a long time!” She showed me a long wooden cylinder, in which namkeen chai would be churned with a wooden ladle called ringaal. The idea of salt in chai caught be off-guard, but thinking about it later, I realised this shouldn’t have come as a surprise: Uttarakhand is famous for its salts, called pisyun loon, typically made of a combination of rock salt, garlic, coriander, cumin, mint and chilli crushed together in a silbatta.
I sit with dadi in the living room slurping from my cup of ginger tea. She described cold mornings drinking tea with her family, in her snow-covered village. I quickly scribble notes so I could remember all the little details about life in the mountains I come from. I always bring my notebook when I visit them.
I long for namkeen chai after this conversation. I buy mutton fat the very next day and leave it out to dry in the sun for a week. Dadi and Usha are surprised at my enthusiasm, but come by with the rest of the ingredients. Together, we roast the seed of dried peach (aadu), and then grind it with a stone pestle, until the they begin to release their oils. Then we slowly add the dried mutton fat, until it forms a paste.
The next steps were simple: we didn’t have yak milk, so we substituted with buffalo. A pinch of salt, a generous spoon of atta, tea leaves (what we call Dehraduni chai) and the aadu paste we’d prepped earlier. Slowly it came to a boil. Then we poured the liquid into the wooden cylinder and, moving the ringaal up and down, we frothed the chai. A small cup poured was poured out for each of us, and then we sat together, sipping in the winter cold.
USHA RAWAT’S RECIPE FOR NAMAKWALI CHAI
Ingredients
250ml yak or buffalo milk
50g dried mutton fat
50g dried peach
2 tbsp whole wheat milk
1 tsp salt
1 tbsp tea leaves or Dehraduni chai
Method
Dry mutton fat in the sun for for a week
Roast the dried peach for 10 minutes on low flame and then grind with a mortar and pestle until you start to see the oils emerge. Now add the mutton fat slowly, and keep grinding it by hand for 20 minutes until it forms a paste.
In a pan boil your milk, add the paste, salt and tea leaves
Best enjoyed in the cold winter months.
Sanskriti Bist is a Bangalore based food stylist and photographer. Bist hails from Dehradun and spends her time researching and cooking Garhwali food
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