Ema Datshi

Bhutan's national dish: whole chillies simmered until soft in a loose sauce of local cheese, eaten as a vegetable rather than a seasoning

Origin: Thimphu & the Bhutanese Himalaya

From the journey of Chilli Pepper.

Bhutan is the one country on earth that treats the chilli as a vegetable rather than a spice, and ema datshi is the proof. Ema is chilli, datshi is cheese, and the dish is exactly those two things: whole or halved chillies simmered in water with onion and garlic until soft, then finished with crumbled cheese stirred through off the heat into a loose, broken sauce. There is no meat, no thickener, and nothing to dilute the heat. A Bhutanese portion is a bowl of chillies. The cheese is the other half and it behaves unlike anything on a European board. Datshi is a soft, fresh, acid-set cow's or yak's milk cheese that does not melt smoothly; it breaks into curds in the liquid and gives the sauce its grain. Feta is the usual substitute abroad and is a fair one, being salty and crumbly, though it is firmer and wants a moment longer in the pot. The chillies matter more than any other choice in the recipe. Bhutanese cooks use long green solo chillies fresh in summer and sun-dried red ones through the winter, when strings of them hang from every roof and balcony in the country and turn whole villages red from a distance. The dried version, eze or dried-chilli datshi, is a different and fiercer dish. It is eaten at more or less every meal, with red rice, and it is the first thing any Bhutanese abroad says they miss. Visitors are routinely served a diluted version, and asking for it made properly is a reliable way to be taken seriously and then quietly regretted.

Ingredients

Ema datshi

  • 300 g long green chillies, halved lengthways and stems removed
  • 1 onion, thickly sliced
  • 4 garlic cloves, sliced
  • 2 tomatoes, quartered (optional)
  • 250 ml water
  • 1 tbsp butter or vegetable oil
  • 1 tsp salt, or to taste
  • 200 g datshi, or feta, crumbled

To serve

  • 4 portions of Bhutanese red rice, to serve

Method

  1. Halve the chillies lengthways. Leave the seeds in if you want it as it is eaten in Bhutan, or scrape some out for a version a visitor can finish.
  2. Put the chillies, onion, garlic, water, butter, and salt into a pan. There is no frying step; everything starts cold and together.
  3. Bring to the boil, then reduce to a simmer, cover, and cook for ten minutes until the chillies have gone soft and dull green.
  4. Add the tomato if using and cook for a further three minutes, just until it collapses.
  5. The liquid should have reduced by about half and be sitting well below the level of the chillies. Cook it down further if it has not.
  6. Take the pan off the heat before the cheese goes in. This is the step that matters: cheese boiled in the pan turns rubbery and weeps oil.
  7. Scatter the crumbled cheese over and stir it gently through the residual heat until it has softened and broken into the liquid without melting smooth.
  8. The finished sauce should be loose, grainy, and streaked rather than a uniform emulsion. That texture is correct and is what datshi does.
  9. Taste for salt, remembering that feta is saltier than Bhutanese datshi.
  10. Serve at once, over or beside Bhutanese red rice, which is the intended partner and does a good deal to make the heat manageable.

Notes

The cheese goes in off the heat, always. Boiling it gives a greasy, rubbery sauce and is the single commonest failure. Long green chillies of moderate heat are what the dish is designed around; Bhutanese solo chillies are hotter than an Anaheim and milder than a bird's eye, so a mixture of long green chillies with a couple of hotter ones is a fair approximation. Feta is the standard substitute for datshi, and a young crumbly white cheese of any kind will work provided it is acid-set rather than rennet-set, since rennet cheeses melt into strings. Red rice is worth seeking out; plain rice will do, but the nuttiness of the Bhutanese grain is part of the pairing.

The Gastrographer

The Gastrographer

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