Xinjiang - My Best Food Discoveries

Kanas, Xinjiang

Xinjiang is a mystical land of deserts, late-night sunsets, ancient Silk-Road pathways and sandstone huts. This is China but it’s unlike any other province in the entire territory. The Arabic script of storefronts, the rolling Uyghur language on the streets, and the Islamic domes and arches might lead you to believe you’re not in China at all.

The city of Urumqi is the entry-point for most travellers, myself included. It is over two thousand kilometre from Beijing, and is the furthest city in the world from a coastline. And you can feel it. A city between two deserts: the Gobi to the East and the Taklamakan to the West. Outside the city, at ground level, there’s nothing but scorched barren land, but like some mirage on the Northern horizon, snow-capped mountains shimmer behind haze.

The whole province of Xinjiang is about eight times the size of the UK. Once we left Urumqi, we drove for nine hours, with nothing but desert - sandy, rocky, mountainous, flat, rolling, black rock, white stones, layered sandstone - pink, orange and yellow. All different but equally inhospitable. A death valley the size of Scotland.

Eventually, desert turns to rolling prairies. There is a mile stretch where it suddenly turns from sand to grass, and life feels less tense surrounded by lush green fields. Camels give way to sheep and wild horses; forests, grasslands and lakes stretch out as if by magic at the foothills of the Altay Mountains, along the border of Russia and Mongolia. Plumes of wood smoke whisper out from the white Kazakh yurts of the landscape, often perched at the riverside, or at the edge of the tree line, always surrounded by their flock. There is nowhere else like Xinjiang for diversity of culture and landscape.

Naan in Urumqi

Most people know Xinjiang food as lamb and flatbreads, but with a diverse mix of ethnic minorities from Uyghur to Hui to Kazakh to Mongol, there is so much more. Xinjiang food is an ancient diet; one that feels unchanged for centuries. It is simple dishes of roasted meat, grains and dairy. Few other places in China rely on roasting and baking as the primary cooking method, and no other province has as much yogurt, milk or cheese.

Although lamb seems to sneak its way into almost every dish, there is so much more to offer:

the homemade yogurt is sour and almost cheesy in flavour, the milk tea is salty with a dash of lamb fat, there is long-grain rice, not like Chinese rice, cooked with nuts and raisins. There are innocent-looking roasted green peppers that blow your head off, and huge burnt eggplants, baked eggs, roasted lake fish, homemade walnut and almond ice creams, and bread in every form: baked buns stuffed with lamb, yellow pumpkin breads, naan topped with nuts and honey, fried naan, buckwheat loaves, sesame bagels and yogurt-stuffed buns.

The air of every town or city at night is filled with the smell of smoke and lamb fat as they cook

chuan - barbecued skewers of lamb chunks cooked over fire. In the night markets, stall after stall sell their specialty - boiled sheep’s head, stuffed lamb’s stomach, rice sausages, chicken legs cooked over charcoal, spatchcocked chickens, cold noodles with chilli sauce.

Fresh lamb on the barbecue

This is food of the desert. There are few fresh vegetables, but heaps of fennel seeds, pink rose petals, sunflower seeds, Medjool dates and big red Chinese dates, plump purple raisins and dried yellow apricots. Fresh ten-kilo watermelons and bright honeydews piled up on the streets, cherries so red they look fake and tiny yellow apricots, a Russian roulette of sour.  Then there’s fresh camel milk and metal bowls of desert snakes, boiled until the liquid is black and bottled up as medicine on the streets of Urumqi.

However, the food is not cheap. This may be the most expensive region in China, especially in the Northern prairies where most food is hauled over the plains and mountains into the villages. Peaches were two dollars each (£1.25), coffee was nearer six dollars (£5) and a Big Plate Chicken for one was ten dollars (£8). We spent ten days exploring Xinjiang, starting in Urumqi, moving East to the desert town of Turpan, and then driving the ten hours north to the Russian border, where huge prairies with Kazakh nomads roam the lands, selling barbecued lamb and fresh milk at the roadside to travellers.

I’m sure I’ve only just touched the surface of Xinjiang food, but here are my favourite food discoveries from trip number one:

Apricot Coffee

Apricot coffee sounds like a naff new addition to a Starbucks summer menu, and I usually steer clear of such things. However, this was something special from a Uyghur coffee shop in Urumqi. They use fresh apricots, boiling them down into a thick, chunky paste, then add two or three tablespoons to an iced Americano. The result is a coffee that is still bitter but with an occasional hit of sweet apricot sliding up the straw.

Kvass

Taking inspiration from bordering Russia, Xinjiang developed their own kvass from the local grains and honey. Each brew is slightly different - some are sweeter, some more honeyed, some are fizzier. There is a beery, rich ale-like taste to each one, and even though kvass is fermented, the alcohol content is almost zero, so perfectly acceptable for the muslim population of Xinjiang.

Baked Bao Buns (Kao Baozi)

Most people know baozi as the fluffy steamed buns that have become so trendy in Western cities in the last few years (think Bao in London). Indeed, all across China, baozi are stuffed with meat, vegetables or even sweet red bean paste, but always steamed. However, steaming is not a common technique in Xinjiang cuisine. Instead, most food relies on stone ovens. And so, the Xinjiang version is like a mini Cornish pasty - chunks of lamb cooked with onion, seasoned and baked in a brushed pasty until hot and crispy on the outside, and moist inside.

Parcel Buns

These were a fun little food that I’d not seen anywhere before. Puffed up buns that are airy and empty inside, so that you can open them up, stuff them and eat as they’re piping hot. They usually come with a selection of stuffings on the side - from lamb and onion, to pickles to Xinjiang chilli sauce or a berry jam. The buns are fried with the texture of a funfair doughnut. Start off with a savoury-stuffed one, and end the meal with a jam-dipped bite.

Cut Cake (Qie gao)

Grapes in all forms are a huge part of Xinjiang diet - fresh grapes are picked and sold in the autumn, but the deserts around Turpan are home to hundreds of stone drying huts, with square holes on every side, for turning grapes to raisins, as the wind blows across the plains and through the huts. Many of these raisins make their way into ‘Cut Cake’, a dense nut cake similar to granola bars, made by boiling down grapes until the sugars become thick and sticky, then nuts and raisins are stirred through and then the cake is moulded. It’s often sold in winter, as the molasses tend to melt in the hot summer months.

Sticky Rice Dumplings (‘Zongzi’)

Sticky rice doesn’t grow anywhere near Xinjiang, but Uyghur cuisine has taken it in and created their version of the festival food zongzi. Zongzi is traditionally eaten during Dragon Boat Festival - a pyramid of sticky rice stuffed with either dates, red bean or pork, and then wrapped in bamboo leaves. The Xinjiang version is simpler and, dare I say it, better. They cook trays of sticky rice, cut it into triangles, and then drizzle Osmanthus syrup and apricot jam over the top, before finishing with heaps of sour fresh yogurt. It doesn’t look special, but tastes amazing.

Bonus Pick: Pilaf

It’s rare to see rice in traditional Xinjiang cuisine. Short-grain Chinese rice doesn’t grow here, but the long-grain varieties were likely bought and traded from India. A common dish across Xinjiang is a pilaf that never seems to change - yellow and orange carrots cooked with the rice in a lamb stock and chunks of fatty lamb. The result is a buttery and juicy dish with sweet soft carrots. I’m not usually a rice fan because of it’s blandness, but this pilaf has got me hooked.