Highland Larder · Dried Beef Stew
Shakam Paa
📷 Closely related photo — Photo: Erik Charlton / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 2.0
Walk into a Haa shop and you'll often find strings of this dried beef hanging from the rafters right alongside the district's hardened yak cheese — two different answers to the same problem: how to keep meat and milk edible through a highland winter.
Strips of beef are air-dried for weeks until dark and leathery, then simmered back to tenderness with potato, radish, ginger, and chili until the dried meat softens into a rich stew. It's ladled over red rice in Haa's farmhouses and small eateries, especially once the cold season sets in.
Why it's made this way: With no reliable refrigeration in a high, cold valley, drying meat in the open air was the practical way to stretch a slaughtered animal through winter, and the rehydrated stew became the everyday way of eating it.
Roughly what's in it
340kcal
24gprotein
18gcarbs
19gfat
Estimated per typical street-vendor portion — not lab-tested.
More from Bhutan
Part of World of Street Food — 3248 dishes from 118 countries.
Something wrong here? Tell us in the comments below.
Photo credits.