23/02/2021
A Tibetan drink later adopted by the state, chaang is a must-try drink in the state of Sikkim. It is produced with fermented cereals and sipped through a bamboo vessel with a bamboo straw. The vessels with the millets are topped with warm water to extract the flavour.
Here is the recipe to try it at home-
Ingredients
5 cups jasmine rice (any white rice is okay except basmati, which would not work very well)
The normal amount of water you would use to cook your rice.
1 full tablespoon of dry yeast, which Tibetans call either pab or chanzi.
Preparation
One important thing is that your containers and your work surfaces and your hands be very clean, free especially of oil or salt, which will ruin your chaang.
Thoroughly wash and dry a large container with a lid to put the rice in for fermentation. We used a plastic one because that’s what we had but you could pretty much use anything. Central Tibetan farmer families we know would use, for example, a ceramic pot.
Prepare a clean surface to work with your rice after it is cooked. We cleared our kitchen table and laid down a large, new, very clean plastic bag on it.
Making the Chang
Grind enough pab/chanzi for 1 full tablespoon to a fine powder.
Cook your rice as you normally would. We use a rice cooker, with 5 cups of jasmine rice, and water filled to the 5 cup line.
Once the rice is cooked, stir around the rice in the rice cooker or pot your cooked it in. You want to sort of loosen and fluff the rice up – you don’t want it p***y or clumpy at all.
Spread the rice onto your very clean working surface to cool it. Work through the rice when it is cool enough to touch, loosening up any clumpy bits.
You want to cool the rice down so that there is just a little bit of warmth left, really not very warm at all, sort of a tepid temperature.
If the rice is too hot when you add the yeast, you will get sour chang.
If the rice is too cold, it will take longer to ferment, which is okay, if you have time.
Sprinkle the ground up chanzi over the rice, then mix it in very well with your
Pour the rice mixture in your prepared container.
Cover it with a lid.
Swaddle it.
Fermentation and After
Leave it 4-5 days in a warm place. Don’t open it in the meantime. Kelsang said when we started to smell the fermentation strongly, it would be ready, but we never smelled anything and after 7 days we opened it up. We think this is because the lid on our container is quite tight. The warmer the spot, the faster the rice will ferment, though you don’t want it in a really hot spot, like next to a heater, or it can rot.
You’ll see in the image that when the chaang is ready, the rice doesn’t look dramatically different than when it went in. There is some condensation on the sides of the container and a few inches of liquid at the bottom of the container. The main way you will be able to tell it is ready is that it will smell like it has fermented, a bit alcoholic.
Once your chaang is done, you will want to transfer it to another clean container, and add about 3 cups of water, and then put it in the refrigerator. (You can add as much or little water as you like actually, to make your chaang stronger or weaker.)
Although the chaang is already fermented at this point, you’ll want to wait 24 hours or so after you add the water before you start drinking it.
You can keep this chaang mixture in your fridge for quite a while, possibly months, or even longer. Tibetans can keep it up to a year. (You’ll have to taste a tiny bit each time to be sure it has not gone bad.)
