![]() ![]() Ezay is often served with red rice and butter tea as breakfast during traditional gatherings and ceremonies. It is more of a rustic dip prepared with finely chopped raw chillies, tomatoes, and red onions and then garnished with some salt, a sprinkling of cottage cheese and some crushed Sichuan pepper. If you feel that’s not enough chilli for your meal, you can rejoice as chillies are served as a side dish in the form of “ezay”. A non-vegetarian version can be prepared by adding some dried beef jerky to create shakam-datsi. ![]() If you add in some mushrooms, it becomes shamu-datsi (mushroom with cheese) add in some beans, it is called Semchum-datsi (Beans with cheese) cook it with potatoes, and it becomes Kewa-Datsi (Potatoes with cheese). It is best enjoyed with a bowl of red rice or with some buckwheat pancakes if you are in central Bhutan. The dish is prepared with local chillies, onions and a generous helping of some fresh cottage cheese. The national dish of Bhutan is “Ema-Datsi” which literally means “chilli with cheese”. With chilli being one of the main ingredients consumed daily, it would make sense that the peppers themselves are not very spicy, but one couldn’t be more wrong as some of the peppers contain serious heat. Almost all Bhutanese dishes require chilli as an essential ingredient. Even in urban areas, you will see strings of chillies being dried out in the autumn sun outside the apartment windows.įor the rest of the world, chillies are considered more of a spicing agent to add some heat to a dish, but here in Bhutan, chillies get the unique distinction of being a vegetable used to make a variety of dishes. During fall, the roofs of traditional Bhutanese houses can be seen covered with the fiery red peppers set out to be dried for the oncoming winter months when fresh chillies are out of season. Fresh green chillies, blanched and dried yellow chillies, and dried red chillies are seen in almost every stall. Whatever the history may be, chillies are now a major part of the Bhutanese diet.Ī visit to the local farmer’s market in Thimphu will greet you with multicolour display of the nation’s favourite vegetable, the chilli pepper. We can only assume that Bhutan being tucked between India and China, both major trading hubs in the past, chillies might have found their way to the Bhutanese palate through the trade of goods. Unlike the potatoes, which we know were introduced by Scottish adventurer George Bogle during his 18th-century expedition to Bhutan. There isn't any written records, and thus, that fact is lost to the pages of history. No one knows when were chillies first introduced in Bhutan. ![]()
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