Culinary Arts of Mongolia
Just got back from another run to Mongolia, while whale is not common we had a LOT of goat parts and marmot. I’m here to tell you marmot is delicious.
The way it is prepared is quite interesting. It starts with a good headshot on a fat marmot using an obscure Russian surplus 4.something mm rifle with a homemade bipod.
Next burn all the hair off the body. From there you remove the head and gut it through the neck hole. Then, with a small knife, you carefully remove all the bones (again through the neck hole). Then mix together all the innards and the bones (with meat on them) and some salt and the stems of a small, plant whose name escapes me, that taste like a wonderful mix of onions and garlic. Next push all this and some smooth baby fist sized rocks back into the neck hole to fill the body cavity and tie the neck hole closed.
Cook slowly for a few hours and the little dude bloats up like a football. The rocks heat up and help to cook it from the inside out. To serve, cut the critter open and take all the goodies out of the cavity and pass the hot greasy rocks to all in attendance. These have a ‘special therapeutic value’; you rub them in your hands and suck the fat off of them. The boneless marmot is then cut up like a loaf of bread and served. Quite tasty!
We stepped out to visit some nomadic herder friends out in the south Gobi and got lucky enough to find them. These folks move around quite a bit following their herds but we know where they were the week before so we headed in that general direction and caught up with them. When you show up with several bottles of vodka it becomes necessary to kill a goat. Interesting way they do this, they look over the herd and choose a goat depending on the importance of the guest. Aint every day that a dude in a straw hat shows up at your ger so they picked the fattest goat in the herd. No guns or clubs involved in the deed, just grab one up by the horn and make a small cut at the sternum and reach inside and find the top of the heart and squeeze off the blood supply till the goat ghost checks out. From there they take em apart about the same way we do, sans the hanging from the tree (aint a lot of trees). They lay it on its back and skin it out and stretch out the skin and stake it to the ground. This becomes the catch pan for all (and I do mean ALL) the bits. The innards are segregated to that which is above and below the diaphragm and placed into large pans for further use.
Following the kill you eat guts, the best part, the first night. This is the meal of honor. With a good fatty goat you obviously get a lot of fat. Some of that was cooked down into a broth with the intestines, spleen, gallbladder, and several other bits. The stomach gets stuffed with lungs, blood, small bits of meat, and those tasty garlic/onion plants and gets cooked in a bowl of the innards broth mentioned previously. The large intestine gets a similar treatment to make a sausage of sorts.
The liver, kidneys, and heart are wrapped in the kidney fat with a dash of salt, skewered with a metal stake and cooked in the ger stove over a fire of coal and dried camel crap.
Then comes the drink…vodka…and a shitload of it. An open bottle is an empty bottle and nobody stops at one bottle. They figure, for planning purposes, at a minimum a bottle per person. This meal had 7 folks in attendance, one was a small child who was switching back and forth between pickles and titties so she didn’t have much, another was our driver who was still on the clock so he just had one glass because that is required and considered an offense to not partake in the first glass. Oh, and you only use one glass as shown in the picture above. You are not required to finish the glass and nobody makes fun of you if you don’t however…you are surely judged positively if you do finish the glass each time it is passed to you. I was viewed in a very positive light.
The meat parts are typically placed into a cardboard box and for some reason unbeknownst to me you drive around with it for several days. I assume this is some sort of curing process but I’m not sure. We would trim off bits and boil them with milk and salt to make a tea that was pretty good.
During a trip to the south Gobi there are three things you can count on.
1. You will get the chance to have some interesting meals with very good people
2. You will get a few flat tires at some point
3. You will get very drunk from time to time
Good times!
The way it is prepared is quite interesting. It starts with a good headshot on a fat marmot using an obscure Russian surplus 4.something mm rifle with a homemade bipod.
Next burn all the hair off the body. From there you remove the head and gut it through the neck hole. Then, with a small knife, you carefully remove all the bones (again through the neck hole). Then mix together all the innards and the bones (with meat on them) and some salt and the stems of a small, plant whose name escapes me, that taste like a wonderful mix of onions and garlic. Next push all this and some smooth baby fist sized rocks back into the neck hole to fill the body cavity and tie the neck hole closed.
Cook slowly for a few hours and the little dude bloats up like a football. The rocks heat up and help to cook it from the inside out. To serve, cut the critter open and take all the goodies out of the cavity and pass the hot greasy rocks to all in attendance. These have a ‘special therapeutic value’; you rub them in your hands and suck the fat off of them. The boneless marmot is then cut up like a loaf of bread and served. Quite tasty!
We stepped out to visit some nomadic herder friends out in the south Gobi and got lucky enough to find them. These folks move around quite a bit following their herds but we know where they were the week before so we headed in that general direction and caught up with them. When you show up with several bottles of vodka it becomes necessary to kill a goat. Interesting way they do this, they look over the herd and choose a goat depending on the importance of the guest. Aint every day that a dude in a straw hat shows up at your ger so they picked the fattest goat in the herd. No guns or clubs involved in the deed, just grab one up by the horn and make a small cut at the sternum and reach inside and find the top of the heart and squeeze off the blood supply till the goat ghost checks out. From there they take em apart about the same way we do, sans the hanging from the tree (aint a lot of trees). They lay it on its back and skin it out and stretch out the skin and stake it to the ground. This becomes the catch pan for all (and I do mean ALL) the bits. The innards are segregated to that which is above and below the diaphragm and placed into large pans for further use.
Following the kill you eat guts, the best part, the first night. This is the meal of honor. With a good fatty goat you obviously get a lot of fat. Some of that was cooked down into a broth with the intestines, spleen, gallbladder, and several other bits. The stomach gets stuffed with lungs, blood, small bits of meat, and those tasty garlic/onion plants and gets cooked in a bowl of the innards broth mentioned previously. The large intestine gets a similar treatment to make a sausage of sorts.
The liver, kidneys, and heart are wrapped in the kidney fat with a dash of salt, skewered with a metal stake and cooked in the ger stove over a fire of coal and dried camel crap. 
Then comes the drink…vodka…and a shitload of it. An open bottle is an empty bottle and nobody stops at one bottle. They figure, for planning purposes, at a minimum a bottle per person. This meal had 7 folks in attendance, one was a small child who was switching back and forth between pickles and titties so she didn’t have much, another was our driver who was still on the clock so he just had one glass because that is required and considered an offense to not partake in the first glass. Oh, and you only use one glass as shown in the picture above. You are not required to finish the glass and nobody makes fun of you if you don’t however…you are surely judged positively if you do finish the glass each time it is passed to you. I was viewed in a very positive light.
The meat parts are typically placed into a cardboard box and for some reason unbeknownst to me you drive around with it for several days. I assume this is some sort of curing process but I’m not sure. We would trim off bits and boil them with milk and salt to make a tea that was pretty good.
During a trip to the south Gobi there are three things you can count on.
1. You will get the chance to have some interesting meals with very good people
2. You will get a few flat tires at some point
3. You will get very drunk from time to time
Good times!
posted by ~z | 1:05 PM
4 Comments:
Damn Chris, you are learning some culinary skills overseas. Next time we are on the beach I want to eat mexican ground squirrel cooked mongolian style.
I still can't picture how you debone a marmot through the neck hole.
yeah, do you mean all the toe bones and everything? could you show us on a regular houston squirrel? I wanna see.
Everything above the drumbsticks was removed, I'm not sure how it was done but I'd love to learn. It would be a pretty cool way to do up a squirrel, dinner bunny, and a baby piggy and make a por-bun-el.
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