Mongolia's obsession with pine nuts (2023)

Halfway up the mountain, Enkhbaatar disappeared.

"Enchbaatar, where are you?" We turned and tried to see his white hat through the tangle of branches. This was not a place to lose your guide. We were just a few miles below the Siberian border in a dense subarctic pine forest known asTaiga. It was notoriously remote, even by Mongolian standards.

Donk.

Something landed on the ground in front of my feet and rolled down the slope. Looking up, I saw Enkhbaatar nearly thirty feet in the air, clinging to the top of a pine tree. He grabbed an object from the swaying branches and threw it at us.

"Take her!"

The Tsaatan are an ethnic minority who herd reindeer on the northern fringes of Mongolia (Credit: GREG BAKER/Getty Images)

I slipped downhill, but Enkhbaatar's six-year-old son got there first. He grabbed the fruit-like object and started gnawing on it. Spitting out a mouthful of purple skin, he showed me the prize below: rows of yellow pine cones. As the local equivalent of popcorn or chips, pine nuts are eaten in bulk because they taste so good.

Enkhbaatar threw a plastic bag for us to carry his loot. I knew pine nuts as dry pods scavenged by squirrels. These were thick and ripe and had a quilted skin like a pineapple. Her sticky juice stuck to our hands as we reached for more.

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For me it was a novelty, but for Enkhbaatar it is everyday fare. He belongs to the Tsaatan, an ethnic minority that herds reindeer on the northern fringes of Mongolia. They live in tents alongside their animals and are largely self-sufficient. Hunting for pine cones in the taiga is the Tsaatan version of the grocery store for snacks.

Caught between tundra and desert, agricultural opportunities in northern Mongolia are limited. A harsh climate makes much of the land barren and limits grazing. That is why Chaatan families move their herds every season to find pasture. They eat the meat, milk and cheese provided by the reindeer, but their diet, rich in protein and fat, lacks the vitamins and minerals that normally come from fruits and vegetables. This nomadic lifestyle—and its culinary restrictions—is common throughout Mongolia and has remained largely unchanged since the time of Genghis Khan.

Pine nuts help balance a meat-rich diet. It is rich in iron and vitamin A - which corresponds to the common malnutrition of children throughout the countryThe World Bank– as well as potassium, magnesium and zinc.

For Chaatan, the taiga ecosystem is an advantage of living along the country's isolated northern border. Pine cones are not found in the grasslands of southern Mongolia. Enkhbaatar's family gathers pine cones every fall to roast over the fire. It's a refreshing change from meat and milk. After a few days of a diet of salt mutton and reindeer cheese, the nuts tasted great clean and fresh.

Pine nuts help balance the Tsaatan's meat-based diet, according to Samuel Bergstrom

A few months later, the deep winter cold in Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, made me crave this unforgettable taste. Surprisingly I didn't have to go far to find it. Despite the availability of imported fruits and vegetables—not to mention fast food chains and coffee shops—even city dwellers have developed a taste for the pine nut.

“They are addictive,” my friend Byambaa told me as we walked the frozen streets. He wanted to gain a few pounds, but there were no trees to climb in this city of glass and cement. We needed a salesperson. While some upscale restaurants offered western pine nuts—sprinkled liberally over the noodles—street vendors sold them by the bag.

As a child, Byambaa had helped her father harvest, cook and sell pine nuts in the forests of Khentii province northeast of Ulaanbaatar on the Siberian border to earn extra income. Today, permits and paperwork are required to sell the nuts, and most of the harvest is exported to China. Mongolians can harvest up to 25 kilograms each year for their own use, but most depend on a supplier like Samjmiatav Azjargal.

The taiga pine ecosystem is a privilege of life on Mongolia's isolated northern border (Source: Anu Haden)

It sells three types of pine nuts: raw, cooked and shelled. He fried them like enchbaatar in a large pan over the fire – without oil, salt or spices. The dry nuts turned a shiny brown color, like coffee beans. They were displayed in stacks on makeshift tables and measured in glass jars. Transactions were brisk - nuts slipped into a plastic bag, brightly colored Tugrik notes changing hands - while passers-by scrambled for warmth.

Azjargal's husband and his brothers travel to the northern provinces of Khentii, Selenge, Khovsgol and Zarkhan in autumn collecting pine cones. Sometimes they bring the whole family and turn the expedition into a camping trip. She took out her phone to show us photos of this year's harvest. The green, sunny photos brought me out of the concrete cold of Ulaanbaatar and back to my memories of the taiga.

Mongolians can harvest up to 25 kilograms of pine nuts each year, but most depend on supplier Samuel Bergstrom

According to Azjargal, the whole tree he climbed in Enkhbaatar was unnecessary. Pine cones were in season when I visited the taiga in August. By mid-October, the cones would be ripe enough to literally shake off the trees. But there's a lot more than hungry squirrels to deal with. Pine cones are big business these days and many people are starting early to stay ahead of the competition. Azjargal confided to me that she also started in August and let the nuts ripen on their cones for several weeks after harvest. They are kept in a dry place and should last all year.

Azjargal paid for our order and apologized for their prices. It was a poor harvest, he said, and the roasted nuts cost up to 13,000 tugrik (about $5) a kilo, compared with 8,000 tugrik (about $3) last year. Shelled ones cost three times as much, so most people preferred to bite into the nuts and spit out the shells, like Americans eat peanuts in a ball game. According to Azjargal, good harvests come on a three-year cycle and she expects prices to remain high this coming winter. I didn't complain. A kilo of shelled pine nuts costs $60 in the US, where I'm from.

Erin Craig: "If the choice is between a bag of chips and a pine nut, Mongolians know there's no contest" (Source: Samuel Bergstrom)

Azjargal handed me my bag and suggested I soak the nuts in vodka. The fortified drink is good for women's health, he said. Instead, Byambaa and I decided to drink coffee to warm up. We opened the bag of pine nuts and a pile of empty shells sprouted on the coffee table between us. The cooked nuts were milder than the ones I had eaten raw with enkhbaatar. They had a soft texture and a slight almond flavor. And Byambaa was right: they were addictive.

Outside the window, Azjargal deftly stayed with the question. Clubs of school children, women in expensive furs, engineers in dirty trousers - everyone stopped for food on the way home. Faced with the choice between a bag of crisps from a warming store and frozen pine cones from a near-freezing street vendor, Mongolians know there is no competition.

CORRECTION:An earlier version of this story incorrectly claimed that pine nuts contain vitamin D. This has been corrected.

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