Charcoal-grilled lamb with ground cumin, chili flakes, and Sichuan pepper — the iconic street food of China's northwest frontier.
In Xinjiang, the lamb skewer (羊肉串, yángròu chuàn) is not street food — it is a way of life. The Uyghur vendors who cook them are specialists, and the best stalls have lines stretching for a hundred meters. The lamb is threaded onto flat metal skewers (wide, not round — so the meat doesn't spin when you bite), alternating lean pieces with small cubes of tail fat that melt over the charcoal and drip into the fire, creating a smoke that perfumes the meat. Then comes the seasoning: whole cumin seeds crushed in your palm, coarse chili flakes from Xinjiang's dried red peppers, a pinch of Sichuan pepper, salt. The seasoning is pressed and patted into the meat as it grills, not marinated in advance. The final skewer is fragrant, charred at the edges, the fat rendering into something almost sweet. You eat them standing up, bought in handfuls of five or ten, the cumin smell clinging to your clothes for hours. The dish traveled east with Uyghur migration — you find these skewers now everywhere in China's cities, but they are never quite the same as the ones cooked over real charcoal in Xinjiang.
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