Hello From one foodie to another
 Preparing the dough |
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 Dough baking on the wall of the oven |
 Bagels and Naan ready to sell |
 Made it in 1 piece to Shipton's Arch |
Silk Road - Naan and Bagels
A few summers ago, my family and I went on a trip along the Silk Road in China. We started in Lanzhou in Gansu province and made our way to Kashi, also known as Kashgar, in Xinjiang province. This trip broke all the stereotypes that travel guides set for China. This fascinating and diverse country is not only home to the Great Wall and the Forbidden City, but also to many landmarks that epitomized the rich spectrum of cultures that comprised the cross-cultural exchanges that were the essence of the Silk Road. We saw evidence of this from city to city in aspects ranging from clothing to food.
My prior sampling of cuisines from the Middle East and South Asia enabled me to identify the similarities and differences between the “Chinese” food we were eating and other foods I am familiar with. For example, naan is a flat bread that originated in Iran but is most popularly known as a part of South Asian cuisine. In Xinjiang, China's western-most province, we got to see people make naan in street vendors. Their technique is similar to the way Indians make naan, which is in a large clay oven that stands on the ground and has an opening in the top. One would prepare the dough and throw it in the oven to bake, its moisture causing the dough to adhere to the sides
of the oven. In Kashi, we saw them sprinkle the dough with sea salt and sesame seeds. My family and I were making a day excursion to see Shipton's arch, the world's tallest natural arch, and on our way we stopped by a vendor with huge piles of naan on a table in a small city we were passing through. These were salty and had finely chopped onion on top. It was moist on the inside and had a crunchy crust and was a perfect snack after a two hour hike up to the arch.
Similar to the naan, the bagels we found in Xinjiang looked almost identical to the bagels found in a typical deli in NYC, except the hole in the middle does not go all the way through. These bagels, also finding their roots from Persian round breads were drier and crunchier than the soft, chewy bagels from Ess-a-Bagel in NYC.
Cuisine: Chinese
Artush, Xinjiang, China
August 25, 2012