Xinjiang Samsa

01

A lamb parcel from the naan oven

A samsa is diced lamb, sheep fat and onion sealed in thin dough and baked on the inside wall of a clay oven until the fat soaks into the crust.

The dough is 死面, “dead dough,” flour and water with no yeast, rolled very thin. The filling is lamb cut into small dice with diced sheep tail fat, plenty of onion, cumin, salt and black pepper, and a splash of water. The dough is folded around it into a square and the edges pinched shut, and the baker reaches into the oven and slaps it onto the hot wall. Seven to ten minutes later it is scooped out with a long ladle, blistered and golden, the crust streaked with fat from inside.

The Xinjiang writer Wang Zu describes what happens in the oven: the fat and juices of the lamb soak into the thin crust, so that although everyone knows there is onion inside, the whole thing tastes of lamb, crisp outside and almost liquid within. In Uyghur the pastry is samsa; Xinjiang Mandarin calls it 烤包子, “baked baozi,” though it has little in common with a steamed bun.

Sources [1][2]

02

The oven: a smaller tonur, sprinkled with salt water

Samsa are baked in the same clay ovens as naan, but never at the same time.

The tonur is a beehive-shaped clay oven, open at the top, with a fire at the bottom; bakers lean in to stick dough to its curved inner wall. A samsa oven, which Uyghur calls samsa tonur, is smaller than an ordinary naan oven, Lou Wanghao writes: the size of a small water vat with the bottom knocked out, turned upside down and built in with mud bricks. Before baking the baker sprinkles salt water inside so the pastries stick and do not drop into the fire, which is why the underside of a samsa often carries a crust of salt that locals scrape off. Wood gives the most even heat and the best smell; in towns, iron ovens burning coal have taken over.

Wang Zu notes a rule any Kashgar customer knows: an oven that is baking naan is not baking samsa, and the other way around. The two need different heat and timing. Standing at the mouth of a working oven is enough to make it hard to breathe, and bakers who spend years there, he writes, barely break a sweat.

Sources [1][2][5]

03

Lamb, tail fat and a lot of onion

The filling is diced, never minced, and the fat is what makes the juice.

Lamb for samsa is cut by knife into small dice rather than ground, so the pieces keep their texture, and it is mixed with dice of sheep tail fat, which melt in the oven and become the hot juice inside. Onion goes in by the handful: it sweetens and stretches the filling. Seasoning is simple, salt, black pepper and cumin, ground and sometimes whole, with a little water stirred in to keep the meat tender. Many shops in southern Xinjiang also make beef samsa.

Wang Zu watched a family make them at a canal-side samsa stall on the edge of Kashgar. The daughter rolled the wrappers thin, folded four sides in to make a square around a spoon of filling and pinched the corners; her brother, crouching at the oven, bent over and slapped each one onto the wall. He could smell the cumin before he saw it, and five young soldiers between them managed fewer than thirty samsa, to the grandmother’s mock indignation.

Sources [1][2][4][6]

04

Look, touch, eat slowly

The inside of a fresh samsa is molten fat, so locals have a rule for eating one.

The Kashgar grandmother who fed Wang Zu taught him the method in three words: look, touch, eat slowly. Look, and choose one baked pale gold rather than dark, which will be crisp but not hard. Touch it, to judge how long it has been out of the oven, so that it is neither scalding nor cold. Then bite a small hole and wait, letting the steam and hot fat escape before you eat. People who bite straight in and swallow, she said, get burned, and it happens to visitors every day.

In Kashgar a samsa is eaten with a bowl of hot tea. Scrape off the salt on the base, eat the filled middle, and dip the plain folded edges in the tea to soften them; an old man without teeth was eating his that way. Three or four are a meal for most people.

Sources [1][5]

05

Square, round, sweet and dough-less

The square lamb samsa is only the most common of a large family.

Sources [1][2][5]

06

Samsa from Xinjiang to Uzbekistan

The samsa is not only Xinjiang’s: the same pastry is baked in clay ovens across Central Asia.

Samsa is eaten all over Central Asia, often baked in the same kind of large clay tandoor, and Uzbekistan claims it as its own. Its exact origin cannot be pinned down. Food reference books trace the name to the Persian sanbosag, “triangular pastry,” and Arabic cookery manuals of the eleventh century already describe sanbusaq, little pies of minced meat, nuts and spices, a word still used for meat pastries in Syria, Egypt and Lebanon; the Indian samosa is a close relative. The pastry reached Russia when Central Asia became part of the Russian empire in the nineteenth century, and Uzbek kiosks still sell it in Moscow.

In Xinjiang the shape tends to be square, and the word survives twice over: samsa for the oven-baked pastry and sanbusa for the fried, crimped one given as a gift at weddings. Xinjiang’s Uzbek families, Lou Wanghao notes, keep their own tonur at home, bake naan once a week and use the small ovens for samsa; in towns, iron ovens fired with coal have replaced the clay ones.

Sources [1][2][3]

07

Kumach: the grandfather, baked in hot ashes

Hotan bakes its meat pie not in an oven but in hot ashes.

In Hotan, people say, “kumach is the grandfather of samsa, and samsa is its grandson.” Kumach is a round pie about ten times the size of a samsa: two sheets of dough with lamb, onion, salt, pepper and cumin between them, the edges pinched into a rope. It is not baked in a tonur but buried in the hot ashes of a fire of desert poplar or red willow and left to cook slowly. It is too big to hold, so it is cut into wedges with a knife.

Wang Zu writes that kumach has barely traveled beyond Hotan, and that locals send you further into the desert, to Gulakhma township in Qira county, for the best; at festivals there people sing kumach songs and dance a kumach dance. Working on a desert site with his unit, he watched women shape the dough entirely by hand, without a rolling pin.

Sources [1]

08

Kashgar’s samsa shops

In Kashgar a good samsa shop is judged by how fast it sells out.

The best-known shops are small and specialized. One Kashgar shop, open for more than forty years, uses over 200 kilograms of meat and sells more than 8,000 samsa a day; a batch is out of the oven in about five minutes, and customers queue for each one. At a bazaar stall in 2023, one man cut the meat, three wrapped, and four ovens baked at once; the samsa sold at 2 yuan each as fast as they came out, about 8,000 a day, against 3 yuan or more in most places.

Bakers also keep a legend. Lou Wanghao records that a holy man said to have looked after food more than a thousand years ago, whose name he transcribes as Yibulayin Ailikesilamu, made the best samsa, and that Uyghur cooks still call out his name in a long cry when they lift samsa from the oven or a steamer, to tell customers these are made his way. The Kashgar grandmother told Wang Zu the same story, comparing her samsa to those of a famous cook of centuries past.

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

09

Buying samsa

Buy them hot, by the piece, from a busy oven.

Sources [1][4][5]

10

Samsa in a home oven

Without a tonur, a very hot oven and thin dough get close.

Sources [1][6]

11

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