Far West Food: Red Rice, Apples and Millet

Nepal's far west runs from the hot plain at 150 m to villages above 4,000 m, and what people eat changes with the altitude. On the Terai around Bardia, Dhangadhi and Mahendranagar, rice, lentils, fish and vegetables dominate, cooked in Tharu, Pahadi and plains styles. Climb into the hills of Doti, Dailekh and Jumla and the staples become millet, maize, barley, buckwheat and potatoes, with rice where it will grow. In upper Humla and Mugu, Tibetan-influenced food appears: roasted barley flour, butter tea and dried meat.

Outside the bigger towns there are no tourist restaurants. You eat what local families and small lodges cook, usually dal bhat in one of its many regional forms. That is not a hardship. Food here is grown close to the kitchen, often without chemical fertiliser, and the flavours are clean and direct: fresh ghee, wild greens, hand-pounded chilli and the smoky taste of food cooked over wood.

The most famous food of the region is marshi, the red rice of Jumla. It is a cold-tolerant variety grown in the terraced fields of the Jumla valley, at around 2,300 to 3,000 m, heights where rice is rarely cultivated anywhere else in the world. Fields around Chhumchaur, at about 3,000 m, are often described as among the highest rice paddies on earth. The grains are short, reddish-brown and slightly sticky, with a nutty taste and a firmer bite than white rice.

Marshi has long been the everyday food of Jumli households, and it is now sold in shops across Nepal as a speciality. It is planted in late spring, irrigated by streams from the hills, and harvested in autumn, when the fields turn gold and red and families thresh grain on their flat rooftops. If you visit Jumla in October, you will see the harvest under way.

Eat it with Jumli beans, local greens and ghee, and you have the classic Jumla meal. A small bag of marshi from Khalanga bazaar is one of the best souvenirs from the far west.

Jumla is also Nepal's best-known apple country. Orchards around Khalanga and in the surrounding valleys produce crisp, sweet apples harvested from late August to October, and in recent decades apple growing has spread across Karnali, including Mugu, Humla and Kalikot. In autumn trucks carry apples down the Karnali Highway to markets in the Terai and Kathmandu. Dried apple slices and apple brandy are also made locally.

Jumli simi, the beans of Jumla, are another speciality: large kidney beans in red, white and speckled varieties, cooked slowly into a thick, savoury stew. Walnuts grow around many villages in the upper Karnali, and you will be offered them fresh in autumn. Also look for wild honey from cliff colonies, sold in some bazaars, and timur, the tingling Sichuan-type pepper of the Nepali hills, used in pickles.

In the hills, grains other than rice keep families fed through the year. Finger millet, called kodo, is ground into flour and cooked into dhido, a thick, stiff porridge eaten with the fingers alongside lentils, meat or greens. Foxtail millet (kaguno) and proso millet (chino) are grown in drier valleys of Karnali and cooked like rice. These old grains are drought-tolerant, nutritious and increasingly valued in Kathmandu as healthy food.

Higher up, buckwheat (phapar) and naked barley (uwa) take over. Buckwheat flour makes pancakes and flatbreads, often eaten with honey or local cheese, and in late summer the fields turn pink with buckwheat flowers. In upper Humla and the Limi valley, roasted barley flour, tsampa, is the staple, mixed into butter tea or eaten as a dough. Potatoes grow everywhere above 2,000 m and appear at nearly every meal.

Greens matter as much as grains. Families collect wild nettles (sisnu) for soup, dry and ferment leafy greens into gundruk for winter, and pickle radish and mustard greens. In the warm valleys of Surkhet and Dailekh, fat pressed from the seeds of the chiuri tree has long been used for cooking.

On the plain the Tharu people have their own cuisine, shaped by rivers, rice fields and forest. Rice is central, often eaten with fish caught in ponds and streams, cooked in a mustard-oil curry with turmeric and chilli. Freshwater snails, ghonghi, are a Tharu favourite, cooked in a spiced gravy and eaten by sucking the meat from the shell. Dhikri, steamed rolls or shapes made from rice flour, are made for festivals, especially Maghi in mid-January, and eaten with meat curry or chutney.

Rana Tharu households in Kailali and Kanchanpur cook their own versions of these dishes, and most Tharu families brew jaand, a mild rice beer, and distil rakshi, a stronger spirit, for festivals and guests. A homestay or a cooking visit in Bardia or near Shuklaphanta is the easiest way to taste this food properly.

Festivals are when the far west eats best. At Dashain in autumn, families in the hills slaughter goats and cook meat curry with rice or dhido, and sel roti, the ring-shaped rice-flour bread, appears at Tihar a few weeks later. In Sudurpashchim the Gaura festival in late summer has its own food: biruda, a mix of five or more kinds of grains and pulses soaked in water, which women offer to the goddess Gaura and later share as prasad.

On the Terai, Maghi in mid-January is the great Tharu feast. Families make dhikri, pork or fish curry and plenty of jaand, and visit relatives for days. In Tibetan villages of upper Humla and Limi, Losar, the new year, brings special breads, butter tea and dried meat. If your trip coincides with any of these, you may well be invited to a meal; it is polite to accept and to bring a small gift of fruit or sweets.

Fasting is part of festival food too. During Gaura, Teej and other women's festivals, many women fast for a day, eating nothing or only fruit and milk, before breaking the fast with family.

Use the table as a shortlist. Availability depends on season, and many of these dishes are home food rather than restaurant food, so ask your guide or homestay host.

Dal bhat is the safest meal in rural Nepal: cooked fresh, served hot and refilled until you stop the server with a raised hand. Eat with your right hand if you want to follow local custom, and do not touch shared food or serving spoons with a hand you have eaten with. In many high-caste Hindu households in the hills, the kitchen is a pure space; wait to be invited in, and never step over the hearth.

Drink boiled, filtered or treated water, not tap or stream water, and carry a filter bottle to avoid buying plastic. Be cautious with raw salads outside towns. Above all, accept what is offered: in villages where food is grown on hard land and stored through long winters, sharing a meal with a guest is a sign of respect.