Tsampa, tolokno & oatmeal. Healthy foods of the harsh climes. Made from wholegrain or husked barley, oat, rye or wheat.

#payitforward
There are quite a few of the food & healthy eating posts in my feed, mostly by @papa-pepper, and that made me hungry, as well as thinking of something that I've tried last year while staying in Buryatia & Irkutsk. It is called Tsampa, and is the food of high lands of Mongolia & Tibet. It is also known as fast food of the nomads & Buriat muesli, but something that follows the same method is also part of the Russian traditional cuisine (but mostly forgotten part of it) and is called tolokno (which literally is a noun from the Russian verb "to ground"). There is something similar in Baltic countries, Finland, and elsewhere. The English wiki article for tolokno talks about Baltic & Finnish foodstuffs!
Additionally, when looking for the English translation for tolokno I was given... Oatmeal. And I was like, isn't it those rolled oats? I've been eating them since I was small, and they are probably something different? Nope, traditionally in Scotland they made rolled, crushed or ground oats, which is more or less what we are talking about here.

When I first encountered tsampa, it was in a packet like this. In Ulan-Ude.

It smelled like roasted barley, really tasty smell. So I asked my cousine, what is it? She told me it is tsampa, and is a traditional meal, also a big part of the celebration of Sagaalgan the Buryatian new year. It folows the lunar calendar and is celebrated on the same date as Chinese new year.
Sagaalgan means the "White Month". The shamans never call the spirits on Sagaalgan or several days after, since they also have a big feast on that day and don't answer the calls. For several days after they do, but are really cranky about the whole thing, so few actually dare to do that.
Offerings for the spirits are made from tsampa, which is considered to be "food of the gods".
With this little sidenote over, lets go back to the subject of tsampa.

Traditionally tsampa is made from ground & roasted barley, stores well, is also really healthy and nutricious. It is put into tea, along with yak butter and salt. But can be used to prepare a lot of different dishes, like cakes or in any other dish you would use flour in.

When I returned from Ulan-Ude to Irkutsk, I wanted to buy some, but it so happened, that it isn't easy to locate. I couldn't find any, but I happened on a small stall in the central market that specialized in organic cereals. There I was able to buy some ground malt rye, as well as some malt barley, which I planned to make tsampa from. Another thing there was the Russian variant, tolokno. The pack talked about it being a traditional meal for the Russian military, as well as mentioning the usage of a meal like that by Greeks including the army of Alexander the Great. I didn't look into those claims, but it sounds plausible.

The malted rye I added to some bread that I baked, as well as making some pancakes with it. Really tasty, but alas no photos. The malted barley I couldn't use for anything, untill I moved to Kazan.

Since I was taken with the idea of making some tsampa, I convinced some friends in Kazan to try. Only problem was to find someone with the mill. Long story short, we had to settle with the food processor.

The malted barley was wholegrain, so we roasted it a bit.

The actual process of roasting is not on the photo, but then we put it into the food processor:

Turned it into this. Took quite a long time too! Here it is halfway done.

And finally:

After we ate it with the tea.

The result was a bit worse then the store bought tsampa, either we should roasted it a bit more, or the problem was with barley being wholegrain vs husked.

If you grow your own cereals, I hope you try it, and tell me about the results.

For more information about tsampa try this article, it is about a couple who,started a business making tsampa in Ulan-Ude, something that most people here would find commendable.

And I'll return to you soon about my adventures either in central Russia, or current ones in Buryatia, depending on inspiration for which story comes first. Most likely it would be a story about my walk in Tunka, since I already have the photos ready for it!