Delicious Xinjiang Food

Last night my brother, a friend, and I went out for Xinjiang food. Xinjiang, the vast, relatively sparsely populated province in China’s northwest, is home to the Uyghur people. Xinjiang food is distinctly Central Asian, and doesn’t share much with other styles of food found in China. There is a lot of meat, in big chunks, often skewered and roasted on an long open grill. They do bread exceptionally well, and everything is liberally dusted with a ubiquitous mix of spices. Also, there is no pork, the staple meat of Chinese food, to be found here, as the Uyghurs are a Muslim people. It is a delicious, and occasionally necessary break from traditional Chinese food--in ways that lunch at McDonald’s can’t compare to.


In the picture you can see most of our meal. There’s the mutton fried rice with roasted carrots, which I think must have been cooked in lamb fat. The thinly sliced red meat is cold venison, which was delicious and sort of similar in flavor to cold brisket. Then there is roasted lamb ribs. The skewers are called 羊肉串, or chuan (r), commonly pronounced with an ‘r’ ending in Beijing. The lamb meat is skewered with bits of fat that melt into the meat during grilling. Not pictured is the lamb heart skewer, which I ate too quickly to photograph. We also had fried eggplant slices, dusted in spices; and a dish consisting of chopped up lamb meat with carrots and hot peppers that was placed into fresh tortilla-like pancakes.

A necessary accompaniment to Xinjiang food is Xinjiang Black Beer. It is possibly my favorite brand of beer in China. It has all the flavor, body, and alcohol that beers like Qingdao and Yanjing lack.