Hot & Spicy Roast Lamb Chops

What it tastes like

Cumin is the first thing you get, warm and smoky, toasting in the lamb fat as the chops roast. Lamb is fatty enough to carry it, which is why the two go together so well and why the same pairing turns up wherever lamb is grilled over charcoal.

The heat comes from dried chilli and chilli powder and it builds as you eat rather than hitting straight away. Our chilli powder is coarse and closer to orange than red, with bits of seed in it, and it tastes toasty rather than sharp. The Sichuan peppercorn is the last thing you notice: not heat at all, more a citrus smell and a light tingle on your lips after you swallow.

The rub is dry, so the outside is crusted rather than saucy, and the fat renders and crisps at the edges. Fresh onion, ginger, spring onion and coriander cut through it.

How to eat them

With your hands. The seasoning is dry and gets on your fingers, and there is no way round that. Order something cold with them.

Cumin is not a Sichuan spice

Cumin with lamb comes from the northwest of China, mainly Xinjiang, where most of the country's cumin is grown and a lot of the sheep are raised. In Chinese it is 孜然, a word borrowed from Uyghur.

Sichuan cooking is built on other things: Sichuan peppercorn, chilli, doubanjiang and preserved vegetables, and pork more often than lamb. We cook this because it is good, not because it is Sichuanese, and the menu says so: there are four Xinjiang dishes in the same section and this is not called one of them.

Hot, not numbing

The Chinese name is 香辣烤羊排. 香辣 means chilli and fragrance. It is not 麻辣, the numbing kind you get in a hotpot, where the peppercorn is meant to take over. There is Sichuan peppercorn in this rub, as there is in the northwest, but it sits underneath and the chilli leads.

Ordering them

If you would rather use a knife and fork, order the 草原羊排 further up the same section at £18.80. It is stewed and falls off the bone. These ones you pick up.