Sepen
A Tibetan tomato hot sauce that's about depth rather than burn. The base is summer-ripe Roma tomatoes cooked down for an hour with celery, garlic and a couple of fresh green chillies until everything reduces to a thick, slightly sweet paste; ground emma (Sichuan pepper) brings a quiet numbing tingle that gives the sauce its Himalayan signature. Fresh cilantro folded in at the end keeps it bright. Smell is sweet tomato concentrated into something almost ketchup-adjacent, with a faint pepperiness underneath. Genuinely easy, you blend, cook, walk away, stir every 15 minutes, finish. Lhasa families make it in summer when the tomatoes are cheap and stack jars of it in the fridge to spoon over momos, shabalep, and rice. Modest enough that it featured once in a New York Times dining-section profile of YoWangdu (a Tibetan cookery family) without much fanfare, but the kind of household sauce that is so quietly load-bearing in Tibetan cooking that meals feel incomplete without it.