Felicity Cloake’s perfect Uyghur lamb skewers. Photograph: Robert Billington/The Guardian. Food styling: Loïc Parisot. View image in fullscreen Felicity Cloake’s perfect Uyghur lamb skewers. Photograph: Robert Billington/The Guardian. Food styling: Loïc Parisot. How to cook the perfect ... Food How to make the perfect Uyghur lamb skewers – recipe Wildly popular across China, these addictively fiery street food snacks spiced with cumin and chilli are yours for the making
Felicity Cloake Sun 12 Jul 2026 14.00 CEST Last modified on Sun 12 Jul 2026 14.01 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google O ne of the most welcome developments in the mind-bogglingly, gloriously diverse world of London dining options in recent years has been the proliferation of restaurants serving the food of the vast, automonous north-western Chinese region of Xinjiang, known by many of the predominantly Turkic-speaking Muslim Uyghur population as East Turkestan. As this fact suggests, Uyghur cooking has many similarities with other Turkic cuisines , including a love of lamb and mutton, and an aptitude for generously spiced kebabs so good that they’re now an “iconic street snack” in the Chinese capital, albeit some 3,000 miles east, in the time-honoured colonial fashion, and renamed as “old Beijing skewers”, according to that city’s own Maggie Zhu . (In Uyghur, they are, I believe, kawap , though I’d be glad to have that transliteration confirmed.)
Happily, however, you don’t need to go to Beitun or Beijing to enjoy them – or even to Golders Green – because they’re incredibly easy to recreate wherever you are, as long as you have access to a smoking hot grill. I declare this the summer of the skewer!
View image in fullscreen Maggie Zhu recommends a well-marbled cut of lamb, or a leaner cut interspersed with small chunks of fat. (Thumbnail pics by Felicity) Lamb, obviously, though Zhu, who is now based in the curiously lamb-ambivalent United States, tells readers of her Omnivore’s Cookbook blog that “you can serve beef alternatively or additionally if some of your guests do not eat lamb” (she recommends short ribs). But you probably didn’t click on this recipe for beef, and you have two principal options when it comes to lamb: either, as Zhu and others recommend, a well-marbled cut such as breast, shoulder or neck, or a lean cut such as leg or rump, interspersed with small chunks of lamb fat, which can often be taken from the top of the cut itself.
View image in fullscreen Helen Graves recommends rump in her recipe. Having tried all of these options in recipes by Helen Graves , Helen and Lisa Tse, Jason Wang and Anna Ansari , I can confirm that almost all of them would be good choices, not least because lamb is more forgiving than a meat that requires cooking through, though the breast is a little chewier than all my testers enjoy. My personal preference, however, is the rump recommended by Graves in her barbecue book Live Fire – she describes the chunks of fat, which, as she observes, become rather less appealing after a few minutes’ cooling, attached as “an aid to cooking, rather than a large part of the eating experience”, while Ansari instructs readers not to “discard the chunks of fat attached to your meat – you’ll want those to tenderise the lamb on your skewer and, if you’re like me, to eat as well”. I’ll leave that particular debate up to you.
If you prefer your meat well done, cut it into the small 1½cm cubes recommended by Zhu, but all my testers voted f…