Such a lovely cookbook! I, perhaps somewhat close-mindedly, didn't really know all that much about Tibet prior to opening this book and I found all of the stories about the country entirely fascinating! Who knew there was so much to know about yaks?! Beautiful photos, beautiful words, you can tell that a love of love and passion went into the making of this book.

I liked this book. It reaches me as a traveler but also as someone who is interested in other people's culture and how the way they live inspires them to share it with others - like me.

The book is divided into Tibetan food and culture. There's certainly a lot of recipes I'd like to try in this book, I found the tips at the end of the recipes quite helpful and I really enjoyed the selection of photography that accompanied the pages.

I found the ingredients list quite helpful and where to find stuff, I always find that's the hardest part of following cookbooks is when you don't have half the stuff readily available and have to go hunting.

Thanks to netgalley for the free ARC in return for my review.

Taste Tibet by Julie Kleeman and Yeshi Jampa was a beautiful illustrated recipe book I had to ask my Hubby to buy it for my birthday. I loved everything about this Amazing recipe book.

It had everything you needed to know and was divided into 8 main chapters plus a lovely Introduction to Tibetan food and its culture which was beautifully written.

Breakfast, cold dishes, Rice & stir-fries, noodles, soups & stews, Dumplings, pasties & bread, Sauces & dips,
street food favourites and a section for us who have a sweet tooth.

Everything within this book, I wanted to create and invite my family and friends round for a nice dinner party.

I loved it especially all the ingredients, are provided in both metric and imperial terms. The ingredients are in British terms, but there are also the American terms available in the ingredients list of each recipe. The steps are so easy-to-follow which is great for me especially as I love this food.

I highly recommend this beautiful book. It will look great in my kitchen and will be used regularly in my house.

Big thanks to Netgalley and the publisher, Murdoch Books, for making this ARC available to me for a honest review.

First let me tell you a story... long long time ago, when I was still a student, once a week there was a farmer's market near my department. And of the stalls there sold mouthwateringly good Tibetan momos. I ate them regularly, recommended them to everyone and still there are days, when I fell like buying a ticket to UK, just to go to Oxford and eat these beauties again...

So imagine my surprise when I opened the book and saw in the introduction that it was written by the very people who fed me during my student days!

Taste Tibet is no longer just a stall - in the meantime Julie and Yeshi have opened a restaurant, and now they are sharing their love towards food in a book. And the recipes show that Tibetan cuisine is far from a sad subbranch of Nepali or Chinese cooking - it is indeed a fascinating separate culture that should be appreciated (and thus tasted!).

I loved both the personal touches and the story of how they met, but also the cultural descriptions - of certain dishes, of how some particular food is prepared etc. In ideal world I would love most of the recipes to be vegan, but at least half of them are, which gives everyone a choice to try their hand and "Taste Tibet" at home.

Beautiful book and delicious food - what else do you need?

I became enamoured with Tibet as a child when I found a beautiful National Geographic book on China which had amazing photos of Tibet. Although I travelled in China during 1991 I was unable to visit Tibet and so the closest I can get to experiencing this vibrant culture is to eat and cook the food.
This is a well written, informative cookbook, written from the heart and with love. I love dumplings and the Momos are delicious, on the sturdier side to most dumplings I have had such as wonton or vareneky but that makes them all the more portable. The Sepen hot chilli dip is a must as a condiment to go with the momos and it goes so well with a whole range of other food.
There is a recipe for congee (rice porridge) which is my ultimate comfort food for when I feel under the weather, however the twist of adding leeks & potato is genius and is now added to my repertoire. I have yet to make the hearty sounding Thenthuk (hand pulled noodles often in soup) and the flatbreads but be assured I will.
Recommend this book whole-heartedly and my thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for access to the ARC.

Taste Tibet is a not just an introduction to the Tibetan cuisine it is also a lovely insight into Tibetan culture and daily life. The book is well laid out with great photographs throughout. The recipes are clear and easy to follow and feel very personal to the authors.

A great addition to your cook book library.

I was given a copy of Taste Tibet by NetGalley and the publishers.

I'm always interested in food from other regions of the world, so when this came up on Netgalley I knew I needed to review it.

This book has been divided into 8 main chapters plus an Introduction to Tibetan food and its culture.
- Breakfast
- cold dishes
- Rice & stir-fries
- noodles, soups & stews
- Dumplings, pasties & bread
- Sauces & dips
- street food favourites
- sweet tooth

This is a lovely book. Most recipes have a colour photograph to accompany them. The ingredients are provided in both metric and imperial terms. The number of portions are provided. The ingredients are in British terms, but there are also the American terms available in the ingredients list of each recipe. The steps are easy-to-follow.

In the noodles chapter it provides details on how to make your own noodles - it's rather like making pasta, though you stretch the noodles out. If a recipe is either vegan or vegetarian then the page makes it clear.. There is also a tip at the end of each recipe. In the dumpling chapter, there are step by steps pictures for making the dumplings which is very handy.

I'd certainly like to make the Famous Chicken Curry alongside a Balep, Tibetan flatbread and the sesame chicken.

At the rear of the book is a list of ingredients and whether they can be found in Chinese or Indian grocery stores.

I loved this book and can't wait to get a copy for myself and start cooking the lovely dishes.

I received this book from Netgalley in return for an honest review.

This is a fascinating insight into Tibetan cooking that immediately made me want to visit the restaurant.

I particularly enjoyed the stories behind the recipes. The photography has to have a mention as it is beautiful. Some recipes might be for true fans only, but there are many that are accessible and sound really tasty.

This is a beautiful book, with gorgeous photographs. It is also a wonderful, heartfelt story and as I knew so little about Tibet, its people and its food, it was a delight to read. Given how much I enjoyed reading the book, I really wanted to give it five stars, but as a cook, I was somewhat disappointed by the recipes. I don’t doubt they are authentic family recipes, but unfortunately none of those that I tried (Giant Fluffy Sharing Bread, Yeshi’s Dal, Taste Tibet Famous Chicken Curry and the Spinach and Chickpea Curry) were tasty enough to be top of my “make again” list.

Gorgeous book, full of flavour and info that transports you to Tibet.

A real feast for the soul.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

I found Taste Tibet by Julie Kleeman and Yeshi Jampa confliciting to rate. On one hand, I enjoyed the family tales included in the book throughout, on the other, I found the Kindle formatting difficult. I’m not sure if there was a glitch in my download but I tried on 2 devices and had the same issue. As others have mentioned, pages jumped in text, pictures looked like something out of Minecraft.
I’d never tried Tibetan food before and was intrigued to get some recipes to try. Honestly none stood out for me to try. I liked the alternative options of including both Meat based and vegetarian based versions of the recipes.
I’d be interested in giving the book a second read through once the electronic download issues are resolved but as yet, I can’t say it was a stand out book for me.
Thanks to @netgalley and #Murdock Books for the opportunity to read this advanced copy in exchange for an honest opinion. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Part recipe book and part personal family story, the latter rapidly became more interesting to me, although I did enjoy the momos section especially. Many of the recipes are suitable for vegans or vegetarians and many give alternatives where useful - my local butcher doesn't have yak for example. The ingredients are almost all easily available and Google soon sorts out what the Bassar curry masala contains/where to buy the frequently used Chinkiang Black vinegar. Although a lot of the dishes were clearly family favourites there was an emphasis on what might be substituted (the authors do run an eatery in Oxford); although useful this felt like a removal from real Tibetan food. The biggest problem for me was nothing to do with the writers, just being a pre-publication I had strange jumps in text, split paragraphs and general jerky page settings (on my ipad). This certainly made the whole book more of a problem to read but, I'm sure, will be ironed out before publication. Thanks to NetGalley and Murdo Books for an advance copy in exchange for my honest review.

So disappointed with this book. I love exploring new cuisines but this one stumped me.. As a vegetarian I do substitute meat but couldn't think of what could take the place of yak. If you're adventurous, go for it. The type was confusing.

A wonderful journey into the recipes, culture and heritage of Tibet. The recipes are detailed and it's fantastic that for pretty much every recipe there is a vegetarian and/or vegan option as well as a meat given. No more hopeful substitutions! A whole section on momos is needed and hugely informative, I've always wanted to learn these!

I found this book difficult to rate. I enjoyed learning about Tibetan food and the accompanying family stories. However I am not inspired to cook Tibetan food,, with the exception of momo ( filled dumplings) which I'd hitherto thought to be Nepali in origin. I tried the Tibetan beef stew. I cooked the beef for longer until tender rather than chewy Tibetan style, and same for the vegetables which would otherwise have been crunchy. I wound up with a not at all flavoursome beef stew plus an enjoyable spicy dip for the beef. I bought Chinkiang vinegar from Amazon but otherwise all other ingredients were in my store cupboard or readily available from my online grocer.

Out of all the recipe books I've looked at digitally to review (Mexican, Baltic, Korean-American, "eat meat and lots of it because plants want to kill you!!"). this was definitely the one whose contents I could predict the least. And that has nothing to do with one of the creators not even knowing recipe books existed until well into his adulthood. This we are told comes generally from family dishes and decades of use of what is easy to grow at altitude, from eastern areas of Tibet, but with Nepalese, Chinese and Indian street cuisine ideas beginning to blend in. The creators have a restaurant in Oxford alongside mobile catering units to spread the word.

Beyond the actual dishes I saw a split here, where this is supposed to be a place where food is revered as a gift and families dip into their pick of multiple dishes, generally in silence to appreciate it more, and yet where you have a day's stock of roasted barley flour to take with you into the fields for snacking, and pickled mooli for snacking through the day, and cured yak meat for snacking, and so on. So is it communal and carefully thought of, or it is handfuls after handfuls?

Well, we're promised it's not the latter, for exorbitant tastes are unheard of, as is wastefulness. That said, the cuisine has again been developed for altitude, a balance of the humours, and definitely with an eye to how cold it is up there, so you'd expect sharing pots of soups, stews and stir-fries. What there is is probably a great surprise – little in the way of rice, and with both stir-fried ramson stems and nettle soup, and fungi shaped like jellied human ears, you could easily be forgiven for thinking you've tuned into Atomic Shrimp. I certainly felt on more expected terrain with the large chapter on momos – think smaller manti, if you've been to Uzbekistan. This section, of home-made then steamed dumplings and gnocchi etc was probably more in line with what I might have foreseen.

But I think this book has too much donkey work (sorry, yak work) to do – it has to get us from breakfast to bedtime with all points in between, salads, dips, breads... And so when it says stir-fries are nearly the be-all and end-all of Tibetan cuisine, and then gives us a bare handful, it's because things are trying to go for excess and be over-stuffed after all. I get where it says stir-fry ingredients can be swapped out ad infinitum based on freshness and preference, but these didn't read as different from any of the world's other stir-fries, and the fact remains the thing probably deserved twice as many momo stuffings as it gets, twice as many soups, and five times this and that. And while it does like to hand-hold and write about each and every dish, and give full-page photos for almost every one too, there wasn't that much wasteful lifestyle porn that could have been dropped.

Also, one final hiccough is that a lot of these do involve specific ingredients, from the mooli to a lot of talk of a specific 'black vinegar'. Now, is that malt, or something uniquely Chinese/Asian and that I've never come across? Buy Chinese, we are told – but nare a mention of substitutes. Don't get me wrong, this book must rank as a success, and I did screengrab more dishes than I normally do – but on a fomo rush, I guess, and not because I felt this was a superlative volume. It's a fine and handy one, but also a little frustrating at times, especially when it seems to be just touching the surface. Four stars then feels a touch generous.

I have never had Tibetan cuisine before, so as an ardent cook, was quite interested to find out what sort of dishes are included in this book. Looking at the recipes definitely made by mouth water and being a vegetarian, I am going to try the veggie/vegan ones. There are a range of recipes, including those for breakfast, rice, noodles, soups, momos and sweets. Most of the ingredients used in the recipes are familiar, with many languishing in my pantry but the Bassar curry masala and Chinkiang black vinegar that are used in a wide variety of Tibetan dishes may be difficult to find.

What was interesting to me was how much influence both Indian and Chinese cuisines have on the Tibetan dishes within this book, although not surprising given the history and geography of the area. For example, Dresil (ceremonial rice) is very similar to the sweet rice made in many Indian regions during festivals. That said, there are several dishes that seem unique to Tibet, such as momos, which originated in Tibet and are a personal favourite.

This book seems to be a labor of love for both the authors and it shows throughout the book!

The story behind this book is just as interesting as the recipes. The depiction of life and food in Tibet are wonderful and immersive, the photographs adding beautifully to the sense of place. The recipes do not have too many ingredients that would be difficult to get. I look forward to trying this new (for me) type of food.

Taste Tibet: Family Recipes from the Himalayas is a really beautiful book written by Julie Kleeman and her husband Yeshi Jampa. It really feels like a family recipe book with photos of Yeshi’s family in Tibet throughout the book.

The book provides a good overview of what Tibetan food is and it’s influences. My knowledge of Tibetan food was limited before reading this book. I now feel ready to try out the recipes and I can’t wait to make and sample the chocolate momos!

The book is nicely broken down into sections for: Breakfast; Cold Dishes; Rice and Stir-Fries; Noodles, Soups and Stews; Dumplings, Pasties and Bread; Street Food, etc. There are lots of vegan/vegetarian dishes to try. The photographs of the cooked dishes are beautiful - looking at them made me feel rather hungry and that I have to start cooking immediately!

Huge thanks to Netgalley and the publisher, Murdoch Books, for making this ARC available to me for a fair and honest review.

A wonderful cookbook that I used for a quick read through and now will use as a reference book. Thank you to netgalley and the publishers for giving me a copy of the book.