Free Food Recipes

Ingredients

• 75 g (3 oz) bamboo shoots
• 4-6 medium Chinese dried mushrooms
• 1.35-1.8 kg (3-4 lb) chicken (plus head and feet)
• 2 slices root ginger
• 6 slices Yunnan ham (or any smoked Mm)
• salt and pepper
  

Serve 6

** Free Food Recipes **

Method:

1. Cut the bamboo shoots into 8-10 thin pieces and soak them with the mushrooms for 30 minutes and remove the stalks. Dip the chicken in a pan of boiling water for 2 minutes to help to eliminate impurities. Remove the head and claws. Cut the chicken in half. Cut both the legs and wings into 2-3 pieces. and the body into 8 pieces.

2. Place the head and feet of the chicken together with the ginger, at the bottom of the pot. Arrange the other pieces neatly on top, interspersing them with bamboo shoots and mushrooms, placing the ham on top.

3. Place the pot on top of a saucepan which is half or three-quarters filled with water. Bring the water to a vigorous boil and keep this vigorous boil for 3 hours. (Top up the saucepan with boiling water every 20 minutes.) When ready open the lid and sprinkle contents with salt and pepper. Replace the lid.

4. Bring the pot to the table, and remove the lid in front of the assembled diners, for them to consume as a ’semi-soup’ dish throughout the meal. A range of soy-based dips (eg. soy, chili, soy chopped chives, soy shredded ginger with aromatic vinegar) should be placed on the table for the diners to dip the chicken in before consuming.

Note: This is essentially a Yunnan dish which frequency appears on Szechwan tables. It has to be cooked in a special earthenware pot nowadays available from some Chinese food stores abroad. The pot is devised for steaming. The center of the bottom of the pot rises to a point in the form of a small spout aiming immediately below the center of the pottery lid which covers the pot closely. When the pot is placed over boiling water or a rising blast of vigorous steam, a jet of steam will be shot inside the pot through the aperture of the spout, and will condense against the lid and drip down on to the chicken in the pot in the form of condensed distilled water. The Chinese regard the dish as a particularly ‘pure’ form of chicken.