LOCAL FOOD GUIDE

Tsampa Roasted Barley Flour 糌粑

Zanba

Tsampa Roasted Barley Flour is featured among the local specialties of Sichuan.

Roasted barley flour and butter for preparing tsampa, before mixing. This is an ingredient photograph, not a finished serving.
Dish photograph · see caption for contextRoasted barley flour and butter for preparing tsampa, before mixing. This is an ingredient photograph, not a finished serving. The source photograph does not establish a local vendor, current menu or universal regional recipe.Photo: jqn · CC BY-SA 2.0
Photo adjustments

EXIF orientation applied where present; resized proportionally to at most 640 px on the long edge and encoded as WebP. No crop, retouching, recoloring or subject changes.

Tsampa Roasted Barley Flour (糌粑) is an everyday Tibetan (藏族) staple in Ngawa (阿坝). In Zoige (若尔盖), barley is roasted and finely ground, then combined with tea and butter for drinking or shaped into small portions to eat.

Mixing it in a bowl

One Zoige preparation puts a little flour and butter in a bowl and adds tea. Another begins with butter, mixes in tea and tsampa, and kneads the mixture into small lumps. Pastoral households also knead in a handful of finely crumbled milk curds.

A local barley version

Black-grained highland barley is another local ingredient. In Ngawa County (阿坝县), farmer Tashi Dorje (扎西多吉) mills it for the tsampa served in his restaurant; milk curds and black-barley flour are shown together as the preparation ingredients.

China Revealed · Editorially updated 2026-09-30

Sources & reading

Written from the linked sources and checked sentence by sentence against quoted extracts by a separate reviewer on 2026-09-30. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.