After walking for over two hours through the rugged yet gentle slopes of the Nubra Valley in Ladakh, I finally see our destination—a pale yellow house—at a distance. Two boys dressed in identical shirts and jeans greet us with “juley, juley” (Ladakhi for hello) and escort us to their house in Hunder Dok, where we are being hosted for lunch.
Hunder Dok is the highland set south-west of Hunder village in Nubra Valley. A 15km car ride from the village, through the unpaved road, takes you to a point from where the trek to Hunder Dok begins. The 5km stretch takes you through a landscape that’s both rough and breathtaking at the same time. Rocky paths that require a steady foot, green meadows with clusters of golden-yellow long tube lousewort, stalks of barley swaying in the wind, and the glacier water flowing all along on its way to meet the Shyok river.
From the open area near the house, where our lunch is set up, I can see the barley farms, the stream flowing downwards, arid mountains shining in the sunlight and glaciers at a distance. Hunder Dok sits in the middle of all this beauty—a village with just 12 families, one school and zero mobile network.
We are greeted with a cup of warm gur gur cha, the salted Ladakhi butter tea. After a round of tea, fresh apricots, khambir, or the Ladakhi sourdough bread, and puli or baked cookies, Stanzin Tsephel, our trek leader and the founder of Stone Hedge Group, a luxury hotel brand, announces that it is gormo time. Gormo is a traditional handmade brass or copper bowl with a thin layer of tin inside and is used to eat phey-marr, a rustic dish made with roasted barley flour—phey means roasted barley powder and marr is butter.
We are handed a deep, greyish-black bowl as the serving process begins. In goes butter, sugar, dry churpay (Ladakhi cheese) powder, whey protein made by boiling buttermilk from dri (female yak) milk, and finally roasted barley flour. As instructed, we mix it all together using our index fingers to make a dough, and break small bites from it to eat—a mildly sweet, buttery snack with just a hint of sourness.
Phey-marr is both a morning snack that mothers make for their kids, often replacing whey protein with warm butter tea, and food carried by farmers when they are working in the fields. They make a large ball of dough, wrap it in a cloth and carry it close to their bellies. “Phey-marr keeps the stomach warm and stomach keeps phey-marr warm,” says Wangchok Namgail, the director of sustainability and community outreach at the Stone Hedge Group. Phey-marr has everything required to comfort the body in the harsh Ladakhi climate. Barley that provides carbohydrates and fibre and is a staple in the region, butter for warmth, and churpay and butter milk for protein. Adding some sugar turns it into a sweet dish.
Halfway through eating phey-marr, we are served tangthur in the same bowl. A dish made of a local wild green called saganik, it is cooked, chopped, and mixed with curd or buttermilk and topped with hot butter infused with skotse or wild chives. It has a garlicky note with a sourness of curd that almost makes it taste like kadhi. I break a piece of phey-marr, shape it like a bowl to scoop up some tangthur for a flavour experience that will stay in my memory for a while.
Shirin Mehrotra is a Delhi-based food writer and researcher.