Soy sauce chicken

Ingredientsserves 4

Method

1. Rinse the chicken, pat it dry inside and out and rub the cavity with a little salt; tie the legs loosely so it turns easily.
2. Choose a pot the bird only just fits. Heat a tablespoon of oil and fry the ginger, shallots and spring onion until fragrant, then add the light and dark soy, rose liquor, Shaoxing, rock sugar, star anise, cassia and three cups of water; bring to the boil and let the sugar dissolve. The liquid should come halfway up the bird.
3. Lower the chicken in breast-side down and, the moment it returns to a bare simmer, turn the heat to its lowest: it steeps, it must not boil, or the skin splits and the flesh toughens. Lid on, fifteen minutes.
4. Turn the bird over and ladle the sauce all over it, then fifteen minutes more; turn off the heat and leave it covered for ten minutes. A 1.5 kg bird takes forty to forty-five minutes from going in to coming out; a 2 kg bird ten more.
5. Push a skewer into the thickest part of the thigh: the juice must run clear with no pink at the bone, or steep it a few minutes longer. Lift it out, brush with sesame oil and rest fifteen minutes before chopping so the juices stay in.
6. Reduce a ladle of the sauce by half with a pinch of sugar and pour it over the chopped chicken. Strain the rest, boil it, cool and refrigerate it for the next bird or for midweek soy sauce chicken wings; boil it hard again before each use.

Take care

• Contains soy and wheat. The chicken must be steeped through: a skewer at the thickest part of the thigh runs clear, there is no pink at the bone, and the thickest part reaches 75 °C. A poaching sauce kept for reuse must be boiled hard before it goes into the fridge and again before its next use.

The story

Soy sauce chicken is roast-shop food, one of the Cantonese roast-meat trio with poached chicken and roast duck; the Chinese Wikipedia entry records the competing origins, an evolution of Suzhou's 桶子雞, a 1920s creation at the Guangzhou restaurant 陸羽居 by a cook nicknamed 撈鬆敖, or a Qingyuan village dish, with the rose-liquor version credited to a later cook, 陳明. At home it is the dish that lets one bird feed the family twice, and the strained sauce is the household's master stock in waiting.

Same technique

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Lo Fo Tong is cultural food-heritage reference, not medical advice. If you are pregnant, unwell or on medication, talk to your doctor or registered practitioner before changing what is in the pot.