Beyond Nan: Xinjiang’s Fried and Ring Breads — Sangza, Girde and the Oven Snacks You’ll Want to Pack
Nan Gets All the Attention, but It Is Not the Whole Story
Every travel blog about Xinjiang leads with nan, the round flatbread pulled from the tandoor. I love it too, but after a month of road trips I got curious about the breads that never make the photos: the fried ones, the ring ones, the ones that snap like a cracker. These are the snacks Uyghur families pack for a day in the fields, the things sold from blue-tarp stalls at a Friday bazaar, and frankly some of the best eating on the whole route. This is a tour of the oven-and-oil breads beyond nan.
Start with sangza. It is made from a simple wheat dough rolled thin, twisted into a loose spiral or braid, and deep-fried until it turns golden and hollow. The result is light, oily in the best way, and faintly sweet if sesame or sugar went in. I bought my first sangza from a woman at the Korla roadside market who fried it in front of me for 3 yuan a piece, and it was still crisp three days later in the car. That shelf life is the whole point: sangza travels.
The first time it really landed for me was a cold morning in early October outside Aksu. I had skipped breakfast to make distance, and a stall by the petrol station was already firing sangza at seven. The woman handed me one straight from the oil, too hot to hold, and I ate it leaning on the car door while the desert light came up pink over the poplars. It cost 3 yuan. I have had more elaborate meals in Xinjiang that I remember less.
Girde and the Other Rings
Girde is the ring bread, a chewy loop baked on the tandoor wall or sometimes in a pan, denser than nan and perfect for tearing into soup. There is also katlama, a layered fried bread folded with oil and sometimes scallion or milk, which comes out flaky and rich. And qowa, a smaller fried puff. None of these have the prestige of nan, but ask any local what they actually eat on a long drive and one of these shows up.
The bakers’ tour of nan varieties will tell you about the sesame-topped heyte and the onion piyaz nan. What it often skips is how those same bakers fry sangza in the slack hours between nan batches. At a real nanfang, the tandoor is a 24-hour rhythm of bake, fry, rest, repeat, and the fried goods are the quiet profit centre.
Katlama, the Folded One
Katlama deserves more than a sentence. The dough is rolled out, brushed with oil, folded like a letter, rolled again, and fried so the layers separate into a stack of crisp leaves. In Yining I found a version brushed with milk that tasted almost like a savoury croissant, sold for 5 yuan at a corner that smelled of hot fat and cardamom. The baker told me, through a translator app, that his grandfather sold the same thing from a cart. I believed him. The thing about katlama is that it eats like a treat but costs like a staple, and you finish one before you notice.
What surprised me was how different katlama tastes hot versus cool. Fresh from the wok it is buttery and soft in the middle. Left on the dashboard for an hour it tightens into something closer to a biscuit, still good, better with tea. I started buying two at a time, one for now and one for kilometre 300.
Qowa, the Pocket Puff
Qowa is the smallest of the fried family, a palm-sized puff that splits open as it cooks and catches a little pocket of steam inside. You get them for 1.5 yuan at most bazaars, often piled in a woven basket next to the sangza. They are plain, just flour and salt and oil, and that plainness is the point. After a week of heavy lamb and chilli, a plain qowa is a relief. I ate a stack of them in Turpan in late May when the heat had killed my appetite for anything richer, sitting in the shade of a grape trellis and dipping them in cold yogurt.
Where to Find Them
You will not see these at hotel breakfast buffets. You find them at the morning Uyghur breakfast spread, where a plate of sangza sits next to the tea and the fresh nan, or at the fried-snack corner of any bazaar. The best I had was in a small town between Aksu and Korla where a husband-and-wife stall had been frying the same recipe for 30 years, they told me, and the oil was clearly changed often enough to keep the crust clean.
Look for turnover. A stall selling sangza that is still warm and slightly translucent at the edges is fresh; a tray of grey, soft rings has been sitting. The street-food tour under 20 yuan maps out the good bazaar corners, and the fried breads are the cheapest wins on the list.
A Morning at the Bazaar
If you want to see the fried breads in their natural habitat, go to a bazaar before nine. I spent a Saturday in Kuqa at the weekly market, arriving when the stall holders were still unstacking plastic crates. The sangza women had their woks going within minutes, and the air filled with that specific smell of wheat hitting hot oil. A man next to them was shaping girde by hand, slapping each loop onto the tandoor wall with a flat wooden paddle, and the rhythm of it was oddly calming.
I bought one of everything and sat on a low wall eating, which is a legitimately good way to have breakfast for under 15 yuan total. A vendor’s child, maybe four, watched me with serious interest and then offered me a piece of her qowa, which I accepted with what I hope was appropriate gravity. Those are the exchanges that make a solo drive through this region feel less like tourism and more like being fed by people who happen to live there.
How to Pack and Keep Them
Sangza and girde are dry by design, so they survive a road trip better than almost any other local food. I keep a stash in the car for exactly the moments when the next meal is uncertain: a road closure, a late arrival, a hiking day with no cafe. Wrap them in a clean cloth, not plastic, which traps moisture and turns them soft. Cloth keeps them crisp for days.
They also pair absurdly well with the tea-house culture of the region. Order a pot of brick tea, break a ring of girde into it, and you are eating like a truck driver on his rest day. The salt and the tannin and the fried wheat are a combination that makes immediate sense once you try it.
Eating Them With the Rest of the Table
These breads are not solo acts. In Kashgar I ordered a plate of polo, the carrot and raisin rice with lamb, and the waiter set down a basket of girde without being asked. You tear the ring into the rice and the oil in the bread loosens everything. At a laghman noodle shop in Urumqi I watched a table of workers dunk sangza into the broth between mouthfuls of noodles, using the fried bread like a sponge for the last of the soup. Nobody explained it. It was just what you do.
The pairing I keep coming back to is sangza with fresh tomatoes and salt in high summer, around July, when the roadside stalls in the south are selling tomatoes the size of apples for almost nothing. Tear the sangza, lay on a slice of tomato, a pinch of salt, and you have a snack that needs no cooking and no plate. I ate that combination on the roof of a guesthouse in Hotan and watched the call to prayer roll across the rooftops, which sounds more poetic than it felt at the time, but it felt good.
A Note on Making Your Own
If you have a kitchen for a few days, sangza is forgiving. Warm water, flour, a little salt and yeast, rest the dough, twist, and fry in any neutral oil at about 180°C until the bubbles set. The twist is what gives it the open, airy crunch. I tried it in a rental apartment in Yining and ruined the first batch by crowding the pan; give each piece room and the oil stays hot.
What you will not easily replicate is the tandoor char on a proper girde, but a heavy cast pan with a lid comes close. The broader food culture guide has more on the ovens themselves if you want the deep end of the rabbit hole.
Seasonal Notes for the Road
The breads do not change much through the year, but the context does. In winter, from December through February, the fried stalls at the smaller bazaars thin out and you rely more on the big-city nanfangs that run all season. Spring, around April and May, is when the roadside trade picks up and you start seeing qowa everywhere again after the quiet months. I drove the south route in May and the markets felt like they were waking up, with new oil in the woks and new flour in the sacks.
Harvest season in autumn, September and October, is my favourite window. The weather is cool enough to keep fried bread crisp in the car for days, the fruit is in, and the bazaars run full tilt. That is also when I found the best katlama of the trip, in a town near the Korla bypass, on a morning when the light was doing interesting things and the air smelled of cardamom and hot fat.
The Oil Is the Quiet Secret
After a while you learn to judge a stall by its oil. Fresh oil gives sangza a clean gold and a smell that fills the street without turning greasy. Old oil, reheated too many times, leaves the bread dark at the edges and faintly bitter, and you taste it in the back of your throat an hour later. In Karamay I made the mistake of buying from a cart whose oil had clearly seen a long day; the qowa looked right but tasted tired. I threw the rest to a dog, who also declined, which told me everything.
The good stalls change oil often, and you can see it. The wok is pale, not the deep brown of neglect, and the bread floats rather than sinks. A woman in Kashgar Old Town told me, laughing, that she changed hers every morning before the first customer, and her girde had that clean snap you only get from fresh fat. Pay the extra yuan. It matters.
Reading a Stall Before You Buy
There is a small art to choosing well. Bright, even colour means a hot wok and a quick fry, which keeps the inside hollow. Pale and soggy means the oil was not hot enough, and the bread will be doughy. Listen too: a good sangza hits the paper with a brittle crack, while a soft one lands with a dull thud. I learned this in Aksu after a week of trial and error, and it turned a hit-or-miss snack into something I could call correctly from the car window.
Buy from the busiest stall, not the prettiest. The queues are the rating system. On a Sunday in Kashgar the longest line at the fried-bread row was a grandmother with a single wok and a steel tray, and the locals knew. I joined it, waited ten minutes, and got the best katlama of that month. The lesson repeats across the region: follow the people who are not tourists, and you will eat better than any blog told you to.
Why Bother With the Less-Famous Breads
Because they are the honest everyday food of the place, not the postcard version. Nan is wonderful and I am not knocking it, but sangza and girde tell you how people actually feed themselves between the famous meals. Buy a bag at a morning market, hand one to your driving partner at kilometre 200, and you are participating in a routine older than the roads you are driving.
Next time you pass a blue tarp and a wok of bubbling oil, stop. The 3-yuan spiral you pull from it might be the best thing you eat that week, and it will still be crisp when you reach the next town.