Xinjiang Lamb Skewers

01

Xinjiang’s favorite snack

In Xinjiang people say that if lamb skewers come second, nothing comes first.

A lamb skewer is a few small pieces of lamb on a thin iron skewer or a peeled red-willow branch, grilled over charcoal and seasoned with salt, chili powder and cumin while it cooks. In Uyghur it is kawap; in Xinjiang Mandarin it is usually just 烤肉, “grilled meat.” The pieces are small, the fire is hot, and a skewer takes two or three minutes, which is why the first one is often gone before anyone can say how it tasted.

The Xinjiang writer Wang Zu notes a distinction locals make: whole roast sheep, hand-held mutton, stewed and braised lamb and the meat baked in a naan oven count as “eating meat,” while skewers are only a snack, eaten often but never as the meal itself. They are what a Xinjiang host buys first for a visitor, to ease them into the place. The flavor is smoky, salty and fragrant with cumin, the chili more aromatic than hot, and the fat is the point.

Sources [1][2]

02

The lamb and the piece of fat

Every skewer has a piece of fat on it, by rule.

Wang Zu divides Xinjiang sheep into two kinds. Those that graze desert, Gobi and saline land give lean, strongly flavored, chewy meat; those raised on grassland pasture and snowmelt give tender, sweet meat, and these are the ones for skewers. Lou Wanghao, who wrote a survey of the foods of Xinjiang’s Muslim peoples, credits the region’s skewers to two things other places lack: its meat breeds, such as the fat-tailed sheep of Altay and Bayanbulak and the Dangbash sheep of Tashkurgan, and cumin. The best meat is from a sheep of about a year old, which a grill owner Wang met in the 1990s advertised as “unmarried lambs.”

A skewer carries four pieces of meat if they are large and five if they are small, and one of them is always fat. Lean and fat alternate so the fat melts and bastes the meat as it grills, and the contrast between soft fat and firm lean is the texture locals want. To take away the smell of mutton, cooks mix the meat with egg white and onion, which Xinjiang calls 皮芽子 (piyazi), and leave it to marinate; cumin and chili do the rest, and some add a few drops of baijiu.

Sources [1][2]

03

The trough grill and the fire

A Xinjiang grill is a long iron trough, three tins of seasoning and a basin of meat.

The grill is a narrow trough of thick iron sheet on four legs, typically about 60 centimeters high and two meters long, 20 centimeters wide and deep, with a perforated grate a hand’s width below the rim for the charcoal. The skewers rest across the top, so the width of the trough is set by the length of the skewers: ordinary ones are about ten centimeters of meat, while a grill for Kuqa’s long skewers needs a trough over 70 centimeters wide. Beside it stand three small tins, of salt, cumin and chili powder, and a basin of threaded skewers.

The best fuel, Wang Zu writes, is red willow and saxaul, the desert shrubs, which give the meat a clean smell and color; in town most grills burn coal, which must be allowed to burn down to glowing embers with no flame or smoke before the meat goes on. Families in Xinjiang often own a small grill and make their own skewers for guests and holidays.

Sources [1][2]

04

How a skewer is grilled

The seasoning goes on halfway, and the grill man pats the skewers together to spread it.

The skewers go on over the embers and are turned so both sides seize. When the fat starts to drip and the surface bubbles, the grill man takes a pinch each of salt, chili powder and cumin from the tins and scatters it over the meat, then picks up four or five skewers in each hand and pats and rubs the two bundles against each other so the seasoning sticks evenly. He watches the heat closely from then on, because burnt cumin turns bitter. Wang Zu says half the pleasure is standing by the grill to watch the fat sizzle, the chili turn from red to glossy and the cumin go from green to crisp gold.

Seasoning during grilling is the Xinjiang way. Wang Renxing, a food historian who studied Han-dynasty images of kebabs, points out that none of them shows anyone sprinkling seasoning on the fire; the old Chinese skewers were marinated before they were grilled.

Sources [1][3][5]

05

Iron skewers, red willow and the meter-long kawap

The basic skewer is small, but Xinjiang also grills them a meter long.

The ordinary skewer is thin iron wire with a wooden handle. The red-willow skewer is a peeled branch of tamarisk, which grows in the desert and has salty sap; Wang Zu writes that it was first used to give the meat a salty taste when salt was scarce, and kept for its flavor afterwards. Red-willow skewers are longer and carry much bigger pieces, so they are called 红柳大串, “big red-willow skewers.” In recent years Moyu, Kuqa and the Erdaoqiao bazaar in Urumqi have also grilled 40- to 50-centimeter skewers of large chunks, stood upright inside a naan oven ten at a time.

The long skewers also turn up at country fairs. At a fair in Tashkurgan, the food writer Fiona Reilly watched a cook season yard-long kawap with chile, cumin, white pepper and salt over a waist-high charcoal brazier, then fold a round of charred nang in half around three skewers to carry them.

Sources [1][2][4][5][8]

06

Kebabs in China since the Han dynasty

Chinese cooks were grilling meat on skewers two thousand years ago, and their grills look much like Xinjiang’s.

In 1980 archaeologists excavating the Eastern Han tomb of Sun Cong at Liangtai in Zhucheng, Shandong, found a stone relief of a kitchen. In one corner a man kneels beside a rectangular grill holding five skewers, each with four pieces of meat, turning them with one hand and fanning the fire with the other, while others slaughter a sheep, slice the meat into strips and cubes and thread them. A painted pottery stove from another Eastern Han tomb, found in 1996 in Yu county, Hebei, shows three women cooks at a four-legged charcoal grill, with six pieces on each skewer and five sides of mutton hanging from the beam. Iron skewers 28 to 35 centimeters long, in bundles, came out of the tomb of the King of Nanyue in Guangzhou in 1983.

The sixth-century agricultural manual Qimin Yaoshu gives the recipe: meat marinated briefly with chopped scallion white, salt and fermented-bean juice, then grilled close to a strong fire and turned constantly, and eaten hot when it turns pale, “full of juice and smooth.” Move it on and off the fire, the manual warns, and the fat runs out and the meat dries. The food historian Wang Renxing, who gathered these images, notes that this classic Chinese kebab became rare for more than a thousand years after the sixth century, and sees the spread of Xinjiang-style lamb skewers as a later innovation rather than its continuation. Xinjiang’s own early history is harder to document: scholars have pointed to a wooden-handled fan from the Shanpula cemetery in Lop county, like the fans Uyghur grill men use today, and to a word for grilled meat in the eleventh-century Turkic dictionary of Mahmud al-Kashgari, but Wang found no excavation report or Chinese text that records Xinjiang skewers directly.

Sources [3]

07

Bonus skewers, tickets and wiping the skewer

Skewer grills have their own etiquette, some of it now history.

In the 1980s and 1990s a grill gave 奖金, a “bonus,” of one free skewer for every ten. Wang Zu, then a soldier in southern Xinjiang, remembers tables of a dozen men in Yecheng and Shule ordering a hundred skewers and the owner quietly adding ten. In the 1980s customers also paid first and collected a ticket from a cashier before the grill man would serve them; when the grills went private, the tickets disappeared.

One saying survives. In Xinjiang, “only a good friend wipes your skewer for you.” The tip of an iron skewer collects ash and charred fat on the grill, and anyone who pulls the first piece straight off eats the ash with it; a friend wipes the tip with a napkin before handing it over.

Sources [1]

08

How to order, and what it costs

Tell the grill man how many, and watch.

Another plate of skewers

Our own photographs of two plates of lamb skewers. The chili-coated skewers are the photo at the top of this page.

Sources [1][6][7][8]

09

Lamb skewers at home

A charcoal grill and a little sheep fat matter more than the spice mix.

Sources [1][5]

10

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