Easy Salt baked chicken (盐焗鸡)

This is a very famous signature Hakka dish from Ipoh. The first time I tried it I loved it very much and since we cannot get it in PJ those days I thought I will try cooking it. One day when I was in the market, I saw someone selling cooking pots and the accompanying recipe book featured this dish. I bought the pot, chicken and salt and went home to cook it. What a disaster it turned out to be. I spent one hour frying 4 kilos of coarse salt to make it yellow in colour and hot enough to cook the chicken. Talk about hard labour. Then I wrap the chicken in grease proof paper, put it into the salt and looked forward to enjoying the chicken. When the chicken was ready, it was another disaster. The juices had leaked out into the salt and I was left with a dry salty chicken. I refused to take the challenge to try cooking it again until one of my cousins taught me an easier way to cook it and it is what is shown below.

Ingredients

½ chicken cut into bite size pieces

5 pieces of dong kwei

1 large knob fresh ginger

Shaoxing wine

Sea salt

Grind the salt onto the chicken

Add the Shaoxing wine and mix thoroughly

Put the chicken into the rice cooker.

Add the dong kwei and water (1 cup for a whole chicken and ½ cup if using half chicken)

Turn on the power and let it cook as for cooking rice

Ta dah!! Salt baked chicken ready to be eaten. It was delicious!!!

Somebody brought back a salt baked chicken from Ipoh today so I will share with you how to reheat it.

This is the famous Ipoh salt baked chicken

Cannot open until it has been steamed

Place the whole pack of chicken on a heat proof platter

Put the platter into the ready prepared steamer

Cover and steam on low fire for 20 to 30 minutes

Empty the chicken juices into the serving platter before removing the wrapper.

Put the chicken onto the platter and let it cool down.

Take the chicken out, cut into bite size pieces and put back into the chicken juice.

Here we are ready to be served.

It was delicious.