This Aromatic Roast Is Perfect for Any Holiday Table

For Anna Ansari, her first taste of Uyghur food was both a shock and a revelation. As she writes in her new book, Silk Roads: A Flavor Odyssey with Recipes from Baku to Beijing, IS THIS LINK TO YOUR BOOKSHOP? she was living in Beijing—an adventurous high-school student who had decided to spend a year in China through a school-year-abroad program—when a classmate took her and others to a different kind of restaurant:

“A group of us set out on our newly purchased bicycles. After a minor bike/car crash and a little bit of blood, we wound up down an alleyway in a small restaurant with signage in a script that looked vaguely familiar and not at all Chinese, and we gorged on noodles and lamb. This was my first taste of Uyghur food. Though I had only been in Beijing for a short time, from the first bite, I knew this food was something different…. [P]latters were piled high with skewers of lamb, glistening with fat, partially charred from the coals, speckled with cumin seeds and red chili flakes, a freshly baked flatbread underneath to catch the dripping juices….

“…[T]here I was, eating this seemingly non-Chinese food in an alleyway in China’s capital city, my teenage mind and world expanding with each bite. This was a whole new world of flavor—but flavors I knew and loved almost intuitively. This food was simultaneously new and exciting to a 17-year-old American, yet familiar and comforting to the palate of a first-generation Azeri-Iranian. Lamb with toothsome noodles was strange and different, while lamb with cumin tasted like something I had eaten all my life.”

Almost three decades later, Anna still has much the same response to eating Uyghur foods—particularly to dishes like the Uyghur roast lamb and the cumin tofu that she shares recipes for in her book. But in the intervening decades, she’s filled in the gaps, becoming even more familiar with Chinese food customs while earning a degree in East Asian Studies, living in and traveling to China, and then exploring the foodways of the countries of Western and Central Asia on research trips to places like Georgia, Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan. (I should mention that Anna is also an international trade and customs attorney and a mother, currently living in London and helping run her family’s business. This is a singularly talented and energetic person.)

Silk Roads is chock-full of stories from Anna’s food history, along with a fair amount of historical research and insight into the foodways of the regions that sit along the historical Silk Road trading routes. She writes about everything from growing up in Michigan, where she learned to love the flavors of her Azeri-Iranian father’s favorite foods, to studying in Shanghai and Beijing as a teenager—first during high school, then as a gap year with a school-year-abroad program, and then for a summer during college—to the the rest of her travels, both in China and in many of the other countries that were once traversed by the Silk Road. Along the way, she gives us tantalizing glimpses of what these areas were like historically, pulling in stories and quotes from historical sources and offering short but engaging histories of many of the region’s most important ingredients.  Read the whole book, and you’ll have been on quite an adventure.

I will admit to a little bit of bias here; some of the memories Anna shares in her book are my memories, too. Anna and I met 25 years ago in Beijing, as students in Columbia University’s Chinese summer program. It was my very first trip to China, and Anna helped sooth my worries with her excitement and adventurous nature—and by introducing me to all of her favorite foods. So, when Anna writes at length about falling in love with sweet-sour “Japanese tofu” in Beijing, I immediately recall the first time she introduced me to the dish, and all the many times I ordered it in the following weeks. When she writes of wandering through wet markets in Yunnan, I see her and some of our other classmates sitting on the sidewalk in Dali. I only wish I’d been able to join her on more of the amazing adventures she writes about in the book—to see the glories of Samarkand, the markets of Baku and the caves of Dunhuang, in Gansu Province (though it sounds like she needs a do-over for that last trip, so maybe we can still do that one together).

While all of the stories and recipes in this book are wonderful, I keep coming back to the way Anna writes about her time in China as a teenager: to that first taste of lamb and the connections it opened up for her between her ethnically Turkish heritage and the Turkic peoples of far Northwestern China. “In Beijing, starting with that first bowl of Uyghur noodles, I discovered that I was connected to something much bigger than myself than I had previously understood,” she writes. “Together, my father’s food habits, his memories of food, and the flavors of Uyghur cuisine built a bridge for me to a rich and complex food culture—one that simultaneously existed in Iran, in China, and in immigrant communities across the globe. This was a food culture whose proliferation, transmission, and evolution could be traced back generations and centuries to intrepid travelers and traders who moved across the routes that would one day be dubbed the Silk Roads…. It was my father’s food culture. It was my food culture. And it was the Uyghur’s food culture. All at the same time.”

Here, Anna has shared her version of Uyghur roast lamb with us, a recipe that is based on meals she ate while living in Shanghai. “It was a rare occasion when I ate this dish,” she tells us in the headnote, “but, my goodness, it was memorable. Every time. The leg would arrive on the table and we would ooh and ahh, and we would dig in. Meaty. Lamby. Cuminy. Spicy. Goodness. Exceptional, tender, juicy Uyghur roast leg of lamb.” Obviously, I had to try this dish for myself.

The Simple, Evocative Flavors of Uyghur Roast Lamb

At its core, this recipe is really just meat and spices and time. You slather the lamb with some ground spices and minced aromatics, then let the whole thing sit in the refrigerator for a few hours (ideally overnight) so that the flavors and aromas seep into the flesh.

The next day, when you roast the meat, you also baste it in an aromatic broth—but you don’t need to do anything to prep the broth beforehand. Instead, you just throw some more spices and aromatics in the roasting pan, along with some purchased stock or water and a bit of dark soy sauce. The flavors meld together as everything simmers in the oven.

The flavors in this dish are the classic Middle Eastern-Chinese notes that define much of Northwestern Chinese cuisine. There’s cumin, of course, and white pepper and chili, but also star anise and ground Sichuan pepper (which is now common in foods all across China). Scallion, garlic, ginger and a bit of brown sugar round out the palate.

Anna told me that in Shanghai, she ate this roast as part of large feasts with flat breads, noodles, Middle Eastern-style rice and lots of side dishes. That said, that meal is hard to recreate in a home kitchen, so when she makes this in London, she serves it with baby potatoes. It would also work wonderfully as the centerpiece of a large Chinese fusion meal with rice, stir-fried noodles and a variety of vegetables.

Choosing a Cut for Uyghur Roast Lamb

The original version of this dish, which Anna fell in love with, was called 烤羊腿 (kǎo yáng tuǐ)—ie, it was, specifically, a roast lamb leg (or, more likely, the leg of a youngish sheep, as lamb isn’t particularly common in China in its very young form). But this recipe is designed to work with either a lamb leg (bone in or boneless) or a lamb shoulder. Anna says that she has substituted lamb shoulder numerous times, because it’s a lot easier to get in the UK than a leg, and the results are always fantastic no matter how it’s made. The real key is getting a cut with a lot of fat on it—the more fat the better. The recipe is also flexible when it comes to the size of the cut; according to Anna’s instructions, you can use a cut that runs anywhere from around 3 pounds to 5½ pounds, depending on how many people you want to feed.

I sourced a relatively small leg of lamb when I made this dish (a portion of a leg, really, cut to size), and I opted for a bone-in piece, to get as close to the traditional cut as possible. A bone-in cut is also more dramatic when you bring it to the table.

For more Chinese Muslim (and Muslim-inspired) dishes, see Georgia’s Hui-Style Stir-Fried Beef With Pickles (Suancai Chao Niurou; 酸菜炒牛肉), Sarah Ting-Ting Hou’s Xinjiang Big Plate Chicken (Dapanji, 大盘鸡) and Sean’s Xi’an Chinese Hamburger (Roujiamo 西安肉夹馍).