Gyurma / Tibetan sausage (藏香腸)
Blood sausage of yak (or sheep) with tsampa (roasted barley flour), stuffed into a yak casing. A high-altitude preparation, bound to the winter slaughter in the Tibetan nomad camps.
| Fresh yak blood (or sheep’s blood) | 500 ml |
| Yak meat, minced | 300 g |
| Yak fat, diced | 100 g |
| Roasted barley flour (tsampa) | 80 g |
| Fine salt | 15 g |
| Ground Sichuan pepper | 3 g |
| Ground ginger | 2 g |
| Onion, finely chopped | 50 g |
| Yak or sheep casing (Ø 28–32 mm) | — |
- Preparing the meat: Chop the yak meat with a knife, slicing it crosswise on a board (the traditional Tibetan technique, two knives worked alternately). The texture should be coarse and irregular.
- Preparing the casing: Clean the yak casing under running water. Turn it inside out to clean it well, while keeping the inner fat so that it ends up inside after stuffing (this fat is essential to the taste). Rinse again.
- Mixing: In a large bowl, mix the fresh blood, the minced meat, the diced yak fat, the tsampa, the onion, the salt, the Sichuan pepper and the ginger. Mix gently to a homogeneous preparation.
- Stuffing: Fix the upper end of the casing to the funnel. Fill the casing by pouring the mixture through the funnel and pushing it with a chopstick. Do not overfill. Tie every 15-20 cm with twine to form the sausages.
- Poaching: Plunge the sausages into simmering water (80 °C) and poach for 30 to 40 minutes. The sausages are cooked when firm.
- Cooling and storage: In the domestic kitchen, refrigerate and eat within a few days.
- Final cooking: Slice into 2 cm rounds. Pan-fry in a little oil with onion, garlic and green chilli. Season with soy sauce. Serve with rice or tsampa (roasted barley flour).
The gyurma (གྱུར་མ) is a yak’s-blood sausage of Tibetan cooking. There are two principal types: the tra-gyu (བྲག་རྒྱུ), a blood sausage, and the che-gyu (ཆེ་རྒྱུ), a flour sausage. The tra-gyu, the subject of this entry, is the more common. The gyurma is produced in Tibet and in the Himalayan regions of Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkim, and Ladakh.
Its making is bound to the Tibetan nomad pastoral cycle. The slaughter takes place in November, when the cold allows for keeping. Among the nomads, each section of the intestine has its own name and specific use. The yora, the upper part of the intestine, serves as a natural funnel for stuffing. The meat is chopped with a knife in the traditional Tibetan technique: two blades work simultaneously in crossing movements on a board, which tears the fibres rather than cutting them cleanly. The blood, a perishable resource, is turned into gyurma within the hours that follow the slaughter. Buddhist teachings discourage the killing of a living being; the herders have practised a drawing of blood from the yak, meant to relieve the animal when it fattens excessively in summer or before a move to altitude. The blood thus collected, a by-product of a gesture of care, serves to prepare the gyurma.
The tsampa, roasted barley flour that is the Tibetan staple, serves as a cereal binder, like pearl barley in Estonian verivorst or rice in morcilla de Burgos. The seasoning is simple: salt, Sichuan pepper and ginger. The nomads keep the sausages frozen through the winter in sewn yak stomachs, stored outside the tents.
In Tibetan towns and in the diaspora (Dharamsala, Toronto, Jackson Heights in New York), Tibetan restaurants offer gyurma, pan-fried in slices. The Tibetan New Year festival (Losar) is the occasion to prepare it as a family, a ritual that carries on the nomadic charcuterie tradition in an urban context.
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