- Uyghur cuisine is a Muslim Chinese food.
Uyghur people are a Muslim ethnic minority in China.
We'll be making hand-pulled noodles, lamb kebabs,
spices, and chiles.
Let's go check it out.
- So we are the Uyghur.
We have more than 30 million population in the
northwestern part of China,
but still a lot of people, they don't know us.
So we eating the halal food,
and then I want to introduce my culture to the other people.
It is the best way, I think.
- At first glance, people relate this to Chinese food,
but it's its own entity.
What's different in the ingredients?
- You know we're the central, the ancient Silk Road?
We have more than 5,000 years [of] culture there.
All the spices.
We learn from both sides, Far East to the Far West.
It's a combination.
We have noodles.
Maybe some of them come from China.
The kebab, samboza come from the West, like in Iran
or Arabic.
You can see every country's thing is in our food, actually.
- Yeah, represented in that.
(brass instruments)
So all the noodles are made by hand?
- [Pattar] Yeah, all the noodles made by hand.
- [Sheldon] Hand-stretched.
So the dough, you make this every day fresh?
- [Pattar] Yeah, every day fresh.
We have to make the oil on it so it cannot stick together.
(noodles flop)
- That was so sick.
That's a noodle right there.
I love the chewiness of it.
The texture is beautiful.
- You try?
- Okay, let's try.
This is so cool.
So pull here?
- Yes, good.
- Brush it?
- Yes, yes.
- And then pull.
- Lift up like this.
(noodle flops)
- Oh! I broke it.
- [Pattar] That's okay it looks nice.
- My noodles broke.
- Pull there first.
- Oh, okay.
(noodles flop)
(all laughing)
Maybe a couple more years.
You guys are amazing artists.
So we saw the noodles, and now we're gonna
put all that together.
- It's called big plate chicken,
in China we call it dapanji.
- And it starts to go back, the influence of
the other side of the road?
- Yeah.
- Oil, cotton oil.
- Cotton oil? Cottonseed oil, okay.
- Sugar.
- [Sheldon] Sugar?
- [Akbar] Yeah.
- So that's gonna caramelize and make the color
much more deep.
Ah, look at the color immediately.
- This is the most important part.
It's the recipe from his father.
- 22 ingredients in it.
- 22 different ingredients, okay.
Text me that later, okay?
(all laugh)
And then it's mixed with a little bit of oil, or water?
- A little bit water, and garlic, a little ginger.
- [Sheldon] Who came up with this recipe?
- My father.
The recipe I ask him, maybe two months.
- Oh he don't wanna give it?
- Yeah, he don't give me.
- Well thank you, dad.
Dried chiles.
Uyghur cuisine typically spicy?
- Yeah, spicy.
Very spicy.
- [Sheldon] And then the peppers are just
gonna brighten that up for some freshness?
- [Akbar] Yes.
- The tomato puree mixed with chile.
Black vinegar.
- [Akbar] Yeah, black vinegar.
- I smell all the chiles, and all the scallions,
and the freshness goes in at the end.
Dapanji.
- Big plate chicken.
- When people migrate to a spot,
the first thing that they want to remember back home
is the food, so the restaurant is always
the gathering place.
- Starting like, 1980s, '90s, some of our people
starts come, because they wanna study, they wanna learn.
For the school, they coming here.
And we don't have that much population here.
In the whole Bay Area, maybe two or three hundred.
It's difficult to live without your community here.
But the good thing is after we open the restaurant,
they always keep coming.
Thank god, every day I can see my people here.
- I'd move to Oakland just for this dish.
- Come on in please.
(both laugh)
- There's a little bit thinner noodles.
- Yeah, gotta try it.
- And stir fried in again, spices.
- We call it lengmen.
- Look at that, the noodles.
It's so amazing.
There's nothing compared to hand-pulled noodles,
the texture of it.
This is the kebab, lamb kebab that's been
marinated in all those different spices.
- Yes, you have to marinate it almost six hours,
five, six hours.
- And you said you get some of your spices even from--
- Yeah, from our area.
- So tender, it's a great way to introduce people into lamb.
And these are your dumplings.
- Yeah, similar, but it's our own.
- Topped off with sesame seeds.
It's flakey, yet chewy.
- Yeah.
- That is amazing.
But you can see the difference of what side of the country
it came form.
The kebab is more Middle Eastern,
the noodles are more Chinese.
So when you bite into the samsa,
it's directly in the middle.
- In China, it's a big population there,
and there's more than 50 other minority.
We're one of them.
I told them I'm from China,
and they look in my face,
and they don't believing.
I say I'm Uyghur, they don't know.
It's difficult to introduce yourself.
In the Turkic system, there's Uyghur, Khazakh,
Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Turkish,
many variety of the nations there.
We have a big land there.
It's 20% of the China land,
so I don't feel I'm a minority there, actually.
But when I moved to the inner land of China,
you can feel you're a real minority there, actually.
It's difficult now,
and a hard time for our people in the area.
Here in the Bay Area,
I am minority, but the Bay Area is full of other
nations here, so it's nice for me actually.
I like it.
Everybody come from everywhere.
Our major customers is the Asian customers,
Chinese mostly, because they know of our food.
But in the area, there's a lot of Muslim community here,
it's like Afghan, Pakistani.
There's Indian also.
A lot of people, they start to know us.
- Yeah, 5,000 years of history right in your food.
Thank you for sharing that.
- Thank you, thank you very much.
You're here, and we're handling like this normally
in my country.
- Right on, thank you.
- Thank you very much, Sheldon,
and I hope to see you again.
- [Sheldon] Right on.
- [Man] See how it's jello?
- [Sheldon] Yeah, yeah, yeah.
All those hours of slow cooking.