Xinjiang Food

This is a wheat and mutton kitchen with the cooking of Central Asia behind it. Lamb goes onto flat metal skewers over charcoal and is dusted with cumin, chilli and salt as it cooks. Laghman noodles are pulled by hand from a coiled rope of dough and topped with mutton, peppers, tomato and garlic. Polo, the pilaf, cooks in a wide pot with carrot and lamb fat until the grains separate. Nan comes off the wall of a clay oven at street bakeries, some rounds the size of a dinner plate and stamped in the centre. Dapanji, big plate chicken, arrives with potato and wide belt noodles soaking underneath. Melons and raisins from the Turpan basin dry in ventilated brick sheds.

What you actually see

• Charcoal lamb skewers - cumin and chilli added on the grill, sold by the stick.
• Laghman - hand-pulled noodles under a stir-fried mutton and pepper sauce.
• Nan from the tandoor - stamped rounds slapped onto the oven wall and peeled off blistered.
• Dapanji - chicken and potato in a wide dish, with belt noodles soaking in the sauce.

When to go

Grill stalls work from late afternoon into the night and bakeries from before dawn. Summer in the Turpan basin is extreme, so May, June, September and October are the sensible months for both travelling and eating in the region. Portions assume a group, and four people order roughly what two would elsewhere.

Honest expectations

Everything is built for sharing and a single diner will over-order badly, since one dapanji feeds three. Pork is absent from most kitchens here. Grilled lamb is excellent for three days and monotonous by the second week, vegetables are scarce beyond pepper, onion and tomato, and the distances between towns are long.

Nearby

Turpan's vine trellises and drying sheds lie southeast of Urumqi.