Flour-Filled Sheep Lung 面肺子
Flour-Filled Sheep Lung is featured among the local specialties of Xinjiang.
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Flour-Filled Sheep Lung (面肺子), called öpke in Uyghur, is a whole sheep's lung filled with a flour batter and boiled. It is eaten across Xinjiang by Uyghur, Uzbek and Hui people, both as a street snack and as a dish for guests. It is usually made and sold together with rice sausage (米肠子), and restaurants in Ürümqi (乌鲁木齐) sell the two in winter alongside plain sheep's lung.
How it is made
The lung is rinsed with clean water dozens of times, until its pink colour turns white. A small sheep's stomach is then sewn over the windpipe to act as a funnel. Separately, a flour dough is washed to pull out the gluten; once the flour has settled, most of the water is poured off and the rest is stirred into a batter. The batter goes into the stomach and is squeezed by hand into the lobes until the lung is nearly full, followed by a liquid of vegetable oil, salt and ground cumin. The stomach is removed, the windpipe tied off, and the lung boiled for about two hours. Cooked, it turns a pale yellow.
Its partner, rice sausage, is sheep's small intestine stuffed with chopped liver, heart and intestinal fat mixed with washed rice, pepper, cumin and salt. Half-way through boiling, the sausage is pricked all over with a thin iron skewer so that trapped air escapes and the casing does not burst.
How it is eaten
Sellers cut the lung and sausage into small pieces and toss them with chilli powder, cumin and salt. Uyghur eaters are also fond of the lung served in a clear broth, and newer ways include stir-frying it, dressing it cold, or cooking it in a hotpot. In Yining (伊宁), in the Ili (伊犁) valley, cold-dressed lung is a summer dish, seasoned with dried local chillies, either as chilli oil or soaked and diced.
At Eid al-Adha (古尔邦节) and Eid al-Fitr (肉孜节) the pair is one of the main dishes at Muslim family banquets in Xinjiang. Because the work is long, the women of a family gather early to prepare it together, and the dish is also known as the 'unity meal' (团结饭).
Where it comes from
Filling a lung with batter is an old technique: China Tourism News points to a Yuan-dynasty recipe in Hu Sihui's (忽思慧) dietary manual Yinshan Zhengyao (饮膳正要) for a sheep's lung filled with flour batter, leek juice, ghee, pepper and ginger juice, then boiled. The version common today is traced to Ili in the 1960s and 1970s, when grain was rationed under the planned economy and a lung filled with batter was a way to make a filling meal.