Laghman

Hand-pulled wheat noodles under a cumin-scented lamb and vegetable sauce, the dish in which the Chinese noodle and the Central Asian kitchen meet

Origin: Samarkand, Uzbekistan and the Uyghur lands

From the journey of Wheat.

Laghman is a hand-pulled wheat noodle served under a thick sauce of lamb, peppers, tomato, and a great deal of cumin, and it is eaten from Kashgar across to Tashkent and Bishkek. The name descends from the Chinese lāmiàn, pulled noodle, and the dish is the clearest surviving evidence of what the Silk Road actually moved: not merely goods, but techniques. The noodle is the point. The dough is rested, oiled, coiled, and then drawn out by hand, swung and doubled repeatedly until a single rope becomes a bundle of long, chewy, uneven strands. It is the same family of technique as the noodle pulling of Lanzhou, and it arrived here the same way wheat itself had gone the other way two thousand years before. What the Central Asian kitchen added is the sauce, and it is not Chinese at all: lamb rather than pork, cumin and coriander seed rather than soy and ginger, and a base of tomato, capsicum, and long green pepper that arrived with the Columbian exchange and the Russian empire. Laghman is a genuinely hybrid dish and it tastes like one. It is served two ways: suyuq laghman as a soup with the broth poured over, and quyruq or fried laghman with the sauce stirred through the drained noodles. The Uyghur version tends drier and hotter, the Uzbek soupier.

Ingredients

Noodles

  • 500 g strong white bread flour
  • 240 ml water, warm
  • 1.5 tsp fine salt
  • 0.25 tsp bicarbonate of soda
  • 4 tbsp neutral oil, for coating

Sauce

  • 500 g lamb shoulder, cut into 2 cm cubes
  • 1 large onion, sliced
  • 2 green peppers, cut into strips
  • 3 tomatoes, chopped
  • 2 tbsp tomato purée
  • 4 cloves garlic, sliced
  • 1 carrot, cut into batons
  • 150 g green beans or celery, cut into lengths
  • 600 ml lamb or beef stock

Spices

  • 2 tsp cumin seeds, crushed
  • 1 tsp coriander seeds, crushed
  • 1 tsp paprika
  • 0.5 tsp chilli flakes

To cook

  • 3 tbsp neutral oil, for frying

Method

  1. Mix the flour, salt, and bicarbonate of soda, then work in the warm water to a stiff dough. Knead for ten minutes, cover, and rest for one hour.
  2. Knead the rested dough again for five minutes, then divide into four, roll each piece into a thick rope, coat generously in oil, coil into a bowl, cover, and rest for a further hour.
  3. Meanwhile brown the lamb hard in the oil in a wide heavy pan, in batches, then lift it out.
  4. Soften the onion in the same pan for eight minutes, add the garlic, cumin, coriander, paprika, and chilli, and fry for a minute until fragrant.
  5. Return the lamb, add the tomato purée, chopped tomatoes, carrot, peppers, and stock. Simmer, partly covered, for forty minutes until the lamb is tender. Add the beans for the last ten minutes.
  6. To pull the noodles, take one oiled rope and roll it thinner between your palms until it is about a centimetre thick and a metre long. Hold both ends, and in one motion stretch, swing the middle down against the work surface, and fold in half.
  7. Repeat the stretch and fold six or seven times, flouring lightly if it sticks, until you have a bundle of strands about 3 mm thick. Pull the ends apart and shake the bundle loose.
  8. Drop the noodles into a large pan of boiling salted water and cook for two to three minutes only, until they float and are just tender. Drain.
  9. Divide the noodles between deep bowls and ladle the sauce over, or toss the drained noodles through the sauce in the pan for the fried version. Serve with vinegar and chilli oil on the table.

Notes

Pulling noodles is a skill and the first attempt will produce a mixture of strands and stumps, which taste exactly the same. Rolling and cutting the dough is entirely acceptable and is what many home cooks do. Fresh or dried Chinese wheat noodles are a reasonable shortcut for the sauce, though the chew is not the same. The long green pepper sold in Turkish and Central Asian shops is the right capsicum here; a green bell pepper is blunter but works. Beef works in place of lamb and is common in the Uyghur diaspora; the cumin quantity should not be reduced either way.

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