Snacks

4 recipes

Peushkel

The most stripped-down Uyghur fried bread: flour, water, yeast, salt absent, sugar absent. The honesty of the ingredient list is the point, what you taste is fermented wheat, fresh oil, and the dusting of icing sugar on top. The hot-oil pass before shaping (the same technique that defines [[twisted-donuts]]) gives the surface a faint crackle and a darker fry colour than a plain yeasted dough would manage; the two short slits down the middle let steam escape and create the puffed shape that gives peushkel its silhouette. Smell is warm bread and frying oil, and very little else. Easy enough that this is the snack Uyghur children learn to make first, no measuring fussy quantities, no decorative shaping. Eaten across Xinjiang for breakfast with milk tea, or as a mid-afternoon pick-me-up, and a household staple in homes where every cookable scrap of flour matters; peushkel exists, in part, because it's what you can make when the cupboard is mostly bare.

6 hours 35 minutes Serves12-15

Pichene

Soft butter-yellow biscuits with a layer of crystalline white sugar pressed into the top before baking. The flavour is plain and clean: egg, milk, sunflower oil, baking soda, the kind of childhood cookie that's exactly as sweet as a child's tea wants. The sugar crust on top is the signature; pressing each cookie face-down into a plate of sugar before the tray is what bonds the topping, and it gives the finished biscuit a faint crunch over a soft, cake-like crumb underneath. Smell is buttery-vanilla even though there's no vanilla in the recipe. Genuinely easy to make: no chilling, no rolling-to-millimetres, no nuanced technique. Roll, cut, press into sugar, bake. A staple of Uyghur tea tables, packed into tin boxes for car journeys and bus trips across Xinjiang, and the snack that every Uyghur grandmother makes for visiting children. The shapes, stars, circles, hearts, are improvisational, so home versions look as varied as the cutters in the kitchen drawer.

45 minutes Serves24

Sheker Manta

A sweet steamed dumpling with the surprising savoury-rich note of rendered lamb fat carrying the filling. Walnuts and raisins give crunch and chew respectively; sugar sweetens; and the lamb fat, slowly rendered to clear oil and stirred through warm, coats every piece of fruit and nut so the whole filling holds together as a glossy paste rather than a dry crumble. Vegetable oil is the standard vegetarian swap and works, but tastes lighter and lacks the meaty undertone that defines the original. The dough wrapper is yeasted and pillowy, slightly thicker in the centre than at the edges, and pinches into a clean triangle with a small visible swirl at the centre seam. Smell when the steamer lid lifts is warm wheat, walnut, and the faintest whisper of lamb. Not difficult but not quick, the dough wants 2 hours minimum to rise, and the wrap takes practice. A Uyghur snack with deep roots; the manta family of steamed dumplings runs across Central Asia from Turkey to Mongolia, and the Uyghur sweet variant is one of the few in that family that breaks the savoury convention.

4 hours 45 minutes Serves12

Uyghur Twisted Donuts

A fried dough with a glassy, slightly biscuit-crisp shell and a soft, chewy, slightly elastic interior, the texture you only get from a yeasted dough that's had a "hot-oil pass" before frying. Pouring smoking oil onto risen dough with a sprinkle of baking soda is the trick: the heat partially cooks the surface gluten, the baking soda neutralises some acidity, and the result fries up with a deeper colour and a crackle that plain donut dough can't manage. The flavour is simple and yeasty, sweetened only by the icing-sugar dusting at the end. Smell is warm wheat and fresh oil. The signature is the shape, a hand-twisted rope that doubles back on itself and counter-twists into a tight spiral, genuinely satisfying to make once you've got the rhythm. A bazaar street snack across Xinjiang, sold from glass-fronted carts next to milk-tea stalls; you eat one warm in the morning with milk tea and it's enough until lunch.

4 hours 35 minutes Serves7