Milk and Sugar? No, salt and yak butter for me please.
By Andrew Gadsden
October 26th, 2009Posted in Quirky, Tea Places, Tibet
Tibetan Butter Tea, or po cha, is a churned drink made from tea, salt and yak butter.
It is a traditional part of life in Tibet and Bhutan, where it is drunk every morning. Nomads are believed to drink around 40 cups per day. Flavour apart, po cha is an ideal way to start the day if you come from hardy mountain stock.
The tea is drunk very hot, so it is warming and comforting. The huge fat content from the butter is ideal for keeping energy levels up when you are burning thousands of calories per day in the cold at high altitude. The salt helps to replace the salt lost from the body through sweating. So we can look at po cha as one of the earliest isotonic energy drinks.
The tea is made using a brick tea from Pemagul in Tibet (quite similar to China tea bricks, such as from Yunnan Province). A portion of the tea brick is crumbled into a pot and boiled for several hours. The liquor is then strained to produce a rich, dark tea concentrate called chaku.
The chaku can then be added to boiling water whenever a hot drink is needed. Tibetans add a pinch of salt and about a tablespoon of yak butter per person. The mixture is then churned for a couple of minutes in a special tubular churn. Conventional wisdom is that the longer the tea is churned, the better it will taste.
It is possible to make something similar outside Tibet using normal tea, either loose or in teabags, and normal butter mixed with full-fat milk. You can use a blender to churn the tea.
It is believed that once you have got used to drinking Tibetan tea, you will suffer backache if you stop drinking it. This is the excuse your correspondent is currently giving for not trying it… yet.
Contact Andrew Gadsden at andrew@allabouttea.co.uk
Read other articles by Andrew Gadsden
Loading ...
You must be logged in to post a comment.