TASTE of Tibet will be making vegan momos at the Cowley Road Carnival.

Recipes are almost never seen in Tibetan cooking, so the measurements are non-exact, but as close as they can come up with. For vegetable momo fillings, anything goes really, and mushrooms make a fantastic ingredient as an alternative to the recipe below. Serve them hot, with soy sauce or a hot chilli sauce of your choice to dip them in.

Serves four.

Dough
About 2 cups of self-raising flour
Between 3 and 4 cups and 1 cup of water
Mix the flour and water by hand and keep adding water until you have a smooth ball of dough. Then knead the dough very well until it is flexible.
Don’t let the dough dry out, or it will be hard to work with.
Filling
6 bunches of spinach
Half a sweetheart cabbage
One bunch of Chinese chives
Two tablespoons of vegetable oil (less if you don’t like the idea)
Pinch of salt 

Chop the ingredients into as small pieces as possible. Mix everything together very well and leave for a few minutes.

Place the dough on a chopping board and use a rolling pin to roll it out thinly, but not so thin that you can see through it when you pick it up. After you have rolled it out, you will need to break or cut it into little circles for each momo. For beginners, the easiest way to do this is turn a small cup or glass upside down to cut out circles about the size of the palm of your hand. 

Then, you can use a rolling pin to flatten out the dough into a circular shape, making the edges more thin than the middle. Once you have a small, flat, circular piece of dough, you are ready to add the filling and make the momo shapes.

The half-moon shape is the easiest. Put one circle of dough one hand, and add a tablespoonful of filling in the centre of the dough. With the other hand, begin to pinch the edge of the dough together. You don’t need to pinch much dough in the first pinch. Now you will have a little piece of dough pinched together, and you should continue pinching around the circle, keeping your thumb in place, and continuing along the edge of the circle with your forefinger, grabbing the next little piece of dough, and folding and pinching it down into the original fold being held by your thumb.

Basically you will be pinching the whole edge of the circle into one spot.
Continue folding and pinching all around the edge of the circle until you come back around to where you started and then close the hole with a pinch.

Make sure you close the hole on top of the momo.

Boil water in a large steamer. Oil the steamer surface lightly, then place as many as you can without touching each other.

Steam the momos for about 10 minutes.