If you have some time, press play to watch entire Bhutan video series, showing you the food and culture of Bhutan.
Please try the Butanese Food out — you’ll be in for a memorable food experience. The famous Bhutanese cuisines as below….
You’ll eat ema datshi not only everyday when you’re in Bhutan, but likely for just about every meal when you’re in Bhutan. The chilies, which can be either fresh green chilies or dry red chilies, are sliced lengthwise, and cooked with datshi, which is local Bhutanese cheese, and plenty of butter for good measure.
Although the basic ingredients remain the same, the more you eat ema datshi, the more you’ll realize that no two ema datshi’s are the same: every cook has their own version, some being lighter or more watery, others being richer and more sticky with cheese.
Kewa is potato, so kewa datshi is potatoes and Bhutanese cheese. It surprised me by how similar kewa datshi is to a dish similar to scalloped potatoes.
The potatoes are typically sliced into thin pieces, then sautéed down with cheese and lots of butter. Sometimes cooks will toss in a few chilies or tomatoes, but usually, this is a Bhutanese dish that’s pretty mild, but just focuses on potatoes and cheese.
A third staple cheese dish in Bhutanese food is shamu datshi, cheese with mushrooms.
Being a chili addict, ema datshi is my personal favorite variation of a Bhutanese veggie cheese dish, but shamu datshi was a close second. The mushrooms, which can be any variety of local Bhutanese Himalayan mushroom, are again, cooked into a cheesy saucy stew along with butter.
Just like with all the other variations of Bhutanese datshi, you eat shamu datshi along with rice.
4. Shakam shukam datshi
Shakam shukam datshi is a rather rare dish that you won’t find at too many restaurants in Bhutan, but when I had it for the first time at a local restaurant in Thimphu, I immediately fell in love with the combination and especially with the unique white chilies.
You probably recognize shakam and datshi already — chilies and cheese — but shukam are Bhutanese dried white chilies. So this Bhutanese dish includes cuts of dried beef cooked with cheese and white chilies. The white chilies ad an incredible sour spice which is quite unique.
Along with beef and yak, pork is also widely loved throughout Bhutan, perhaps the most of all meats.
For phaksha paa, slices of pork are stir fried with whole red dry chilies and sometimes some mountain vegetables as well. The result is another staple Bhutanese dish that goes great with rice and mixed in with some datshi dishes.
If there’s a meat that can be argued as better than dried beef, it’s dried yak meat. Yak is similar tasting to beef, but it has a little bit of a different fragrance (without being too gamey), and it supposedly is quite nutritional.
For yaksha shakam, the yak meat is dried into a jerky like meat and it can be cooked in a number of different ways. One of the best versions of dried yak meat that I ate in Bhutan was dried yak cut up and cooked with fermented yak cheese. It was a Bhutanese dish of dreams.
Juma is a type of common Bhutanese sausage made with minced meat, rice, and some light spices all filled into an intestines wrapper.
The first thing I could taste on my first bite of juma was the wonderful citrusy zing of Sichuan pepper. Other than that, most versions of Bhutanese juma I tasted were a little plain tasting, but very meaty.
Jasha maru is Bhutanese chicken stew, or sometimes called a chicken curry.
One of the tastes I love so much about Bhutanese jasha maru is the noticeable ginger taste, that nearly every version of the dish had that I tried. The actual dry spice flavor is quite mild, but the ginger is what really gives this dish its essence.
Momos are dumplings that are popularly eaten from India to Nepal to Bhutan and known as a Tibetan food – basically the entire Himalayan region – and even broader, they are very similar to any type of dumpling around the world, probably originating from China.
Momos are easily the most common of all restaurant and street food snacks that you’ll find in Bhutan. They are served piping hot, filled with minced meat, cheese, or vegetables, and consumed with lots of Bhutanese chili sauce known as ezay.
You can get momos freshly steamed or also deep fried momos, which are fried in oil after being steamed. Let’s just say, you’ll be in no short supply of momos when you visit Bhutan.
Known especially for originating from Haa Valley in Bhutan, hoentay are similar to momos, but they are made with a buckwheat dough wrapper. The dumplings are usually filled with a combination of a local spinach or turnip leaves and cheese, and again, they can either be steamed or fried.
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