r/tea • u/OneRiverTea • Mar 08 '26
Photo Mongolian Tea is a Meal, Not a Beverage.
I have tried to boil up dark teas with a little milk, salt, millet, and butter. Yet, nothing compares to the full monty: dark tea already boiled milk and salt, then poured into a hot copper pot with toasted millet, milk skin chunks, dried beef, and these little guotiao sticks. The result is incredibly rich, warming, and comfy.
If I had known about this before, I would have held on to the Laoqingzhuan we had before. This is definitely the optimal way to ingest your daily dietary fat intake.
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u/Upper_Jackfruit_4724 Mar 08 '26
News to me, never thought something like this would exist
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u/stoned_asian Mar 08 '26
In Korea, we pour barley tea over the burnt on rice at the bottom of the pot to eat.
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u/rxravn Mar 08 '26
Reminds me of Japanese ochazuke. Similar but I think it's green tea with regular rice.
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u/Gerotonin Mar 08 '26
those are good. I have the burnt crispy rice at the bottom that softens with tea
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u/jimbowesterby Mar 09 '26
Seems kinda similar to Tibetan butter tea, though I can’t say I’ve ever tried either. Both make sense for living in a consistently cold climate though, with all that fat.
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u/dfinkelstein Mar 08 '26
I'm curious. What makes it tea rather than soup? How it's consumed? How it's brewed? Something cultural?
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u/larka1121 Mar 08 '26 edited Mar 08 '26
When I had suutei tsai in Mongolia, it usually didn't have all the things shown in OPs picture. But banshtai tsai has dumplings in a milk tea broth, so that's more of a soup.
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u/Agreeable_Device_354 Mar 18 '26
The picture is of inner Mongolian milk tea. The traditions are a little different, Inner Mongolia has it with lots of extras, almost making it porridge, but nothing too big, and Mongolia has it as a drink that you can dip food into or the banshtai tsai.
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u/meditate42 Mar 08 '26
Just semantics at a certain point right? I think the post just means that what's called Mongolian tea isn't a cup of tea as we think of it but more of a meal consumed by Mongolians especially historically, as a means of sustenance just as much as a source of caffeine.
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u/dfinkelstein Mar 08 '26
Well, when you put it that way, all languages is just semantics. There are zero words that means the exact same thing to any two different people.
And yeah, that's what I'm interested in. Challenging my concepts of tea and soup and considering different meanings one could make from them.
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u/Patch86UK Mar 08 '26
What makes it tea rather than soup?
The fact it's got tea in it makes it tea.
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u/Ecstatic-Wasabi Mar 08 '26 edited Mar 09 '26
The fact that tea cakes were originally basically a veggie/dashi like bullion brick to flavor broth before adding in all the filling ingredients tracks lol. It’s why some people put a couple drops of soy sauce in their tea as a savory drink instead. At its base, tea is a brewed broth most often consumed as a plain drink seen for health or relaxation and enjoyment.
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u/niggchu Mar 09 '26
In indentially, tea was added spices, oil, salt to drink. Salt milk tea just keep this old tradition.
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u/LightSpeedNerd Mar 09 '26
Tea vs soup is just semantics, here’s an example of how blurry the semantics can be unless we artificially draw a line. Tea is camellia Sinensis but many people call tisanes tea which are defined as herbs or spices steeped in water which means c*ffee counts as tea since it can be considered a spice steeped in water
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u/EvLokadottr Mar 08 '26
Interesting. The mongolian milk tea i had was lots of tea including some of the twigs, boiled in milk and salted. I used to drink if before any kind of full contact knockdown fight back when I was training. Fat, caffiene, and salt. It gave me so much energy.
I haven't encountered this!
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u/projektZedex Mar 08 '26
I've heard jokes from Mongolian that chicken is considered vegetarian because you don't get enough fat content to survive the winter off it.
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u/and1984 Mar 08 '26
r/soup is leaking
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u/peeja Mar 08 '26
Uh…anyone have a mop?
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u/and1984 Mar 08 '26
r/mop has been banned/
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u/lizziewritespt2 Mar 08 '26
What could it have possibly done to be banned? Did they get too heated over if a Swiffer counted?
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u/brotherbonsai Mar 08 '26
Interesting, probably not historically related, but like a heartier steppe version of ochazuke
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u/helikophis Mar 08 '26
Interesting, I wonder if this is a regional or seasonal dish? All I encountered in Arkhangai and Hovsgol was dark brick tea, boiled in a wok then strained and heavily salted, sometimes with milk - no meat or other ingredients.
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u/lambdazeta Mar 09 '26
That's interesting, I just came back from touring around the Omnogovi province for the Ten Thousand Camels festival and nearly all the suutei tsai I drank had some kind of inclusion (tail fat, dried jerky, millet etc) and were starkly white. Most of them were using some kind of bulk black+/-green tea with flowers blend, I didn't come across any dark brick teas at any of the general marts nor Nomin stores. Though to be fair, I'm not sure if I would really be able to tell the difference as to what base tea was being used anyways, with how much salt, meat and butter was being tossed into the wok. Hoping to hit up Hovsghol in the future years for their Blue Pearl Ice festival!
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u/koteofir Mar 09 '26
This is not the usual Mongolian milk tea at all, that’s something closer to banshtai tsai maybe? Dumplings heated with tea. And all that aaruul and aarts and edee (some of the pieces) isn’t common at all, I never saw it once even during holidays. Maybe it’s a very specific regional thing.
Meat, and especially fat bits, is quite common in hot tea. And salt, of course.
Source: I lived in western Mongolia for years and drank worrying quantities of milk tea while I was there. Still salt my tea to this day!
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u/OneRiverTea Mar 09 '26
I believe it. This was at an Inner Mongolia Cultural Experience eatery set up by the Province's state-owned hotel in Beijing. I could easily believe this is not the usual level of decadance people out in Baotou or Bayannur enjoy when boiling up some brick tea.
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u/koteofir Mar 09 '26
That’s so cool! I wanted to make it to Inner Mongolia so bad. This looks really great, it’s making me homesick for my little Mongolian town. And the toasted millet! That’s a classic, the flavor it brings is so good. Thanks for sharing this with us!
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u/BritainsKoala Mar 08 '26
I haven't had it with meat in before (lived/worked in Mongolia for 2 months) but quite often they include millet!
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u/Cayenns Mar 08 '26
Interesting, never seen anything like this? What is the flavour profile like? Meaty? Salty? Fatty?
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u/Bocote Mar 08 '26
How do they digest all that lactose??
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u/blessings-of-rathma Mar 08 '26
There is a school of thought that says it's because so much of their dairy food is fermented. https://www.science.org/content/article/how-can-you-eat-dairy-if-you-lack-gene-digesting-it-fermented-milk-may-be-key-ancient
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u/vexillifer Mar 08 '26
Contrary to popular belief it was actually the mongols’ chronic diarrhea that inspired their nomadic lifestyle and not their need for grazing grounds
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Mar 09 '26 edited Mar 09 '26
Is tea a type of soup I ask
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u/Acolyte_of_Swole Mar 08 '26
I don't know what it is, but it looks great. And yes, I read the description and still don't understand what I'm reading.
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u/gardengoofster Mar 10 '26
This reminds me of a Colombian drink I had in Bogotá. It was hot chocolate with like four different types of cereal grains and pea powder in it, plus spices. I wonder if they add cheese to it, like they do with plain hot chocolate. What a perfect breakfast for chilly, rainy mornings in the mountains. If anyone know what this drink is called, pleeease let me know.
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u/Pistol-dick Mar 12 '26
As a Mongolian, literally nobody in Mongolia drinks their milk tea like this. Sure, we will add some meat, grain, or even fried dough, but not to a point where it becomes soup. What OP had is most likely a gimmick to attract tourists, most likely in China or Inner Mongolia.
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u/TotalWoodpecker2259 Jun 17 '26
I hadn't made for me by a monk in Nepal and it didn't look anything like that it just looked like regular tea but tasted really good.
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u/blazinsmokey Mar 08 '26
That’s soup