Nepali cooking 101: Momo

Since arriving I've been learning more about the Nepali cuisine and have tried so many different local dishes - everything from buffalo brain to tasty daal bhaat. Momo, which are somewhat similar to steamed dumplings, are one of my favorite things to eat.

Today I took a cooking class with Social Tours in order to learn how to cook momo. The class began by shopping for ingredients...

The cabbage, red onions, carrot, coriander, green spring onions, ginger and garlic had to be very finely chopped/ground and then mixed together with the spices - turmeric, cumin, red chili powder, garammasala and MoMoMasala. The tomatoes were used to make a spicey sauce that goes well with the momos. The dough part of momos is a mixture of flour and water. We made vegetarian momo and chicken momo.

The toughest part (also the most fun) was actually wrapping the momo with the dough because it's a bit of an art form in itself.

That is my first attempt at folding a momo! It's definitely not perfect and a bit too squashed, but I think I improved with practice. This momo was folded using a round technique, but we also made another style which are longer and more like a fan shape. After folding the momos, they went into a steamer for roughly 15 minutes.