Tsampa: The Tibetan Cereal That Helped Spark An Uprising
On rare occasions as a kid, Renzin Yuthok and his family got to share a special breakfast. They'd gather around a table in their home in Bellevue, Wash., his dad would roll tsampa flour, butter and tea into balls called pa, and then he'd hand them out to his kids.
The meal served a symbolic purpose for Yuthok: "From a very young age, [Tibetans] are taught that ... reclaiming our homeland ... is what our highest aspiration could be," he says. Yuthok's family fled Tibet in the 1950s, but their breakfast — and its grounding ingredient, tsampa — kept him connected to that dream.
The word tsampa in Tibetan usually refers to ground-up, roasted barley flour, although occasionally the flour comes from wheat or another grain. It can be made into cereal, mashed into a or mixed with yak butter and tea at religious ceremonies and can be incorporated into wedding cakes. The Dalai Lama he eats it for breakfast.
