Limbu Preserve · Smoked Dried Meat

Sukuti

Photo: Raunak Maskay / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0

The same dried meat turns up in two forms: fried or roasted as a drinking snack, or shredded into sukuti sadeko, tossed with mustard oil, chili, onion and timur pepper.

Strips of buffalo or goat meat are trimmed of fat, rubbed with salt, chili, turmeric and cumin, then hung above a wood-fired hearth until the smoke dries them into deeply savory jerky. Vendors in eastern hill towns pan-sear or deep-fry it to order and serve it with onion, tomato and coriander as a spicy bar snack.

Why it's made this way: It grew out of Himalayan communities' need to preserve meat from temple sacrifices and winter slaughter through months when fresh food was scarce, a practice especially strong among the Limbu people of Nepal's eastern hills.