Chicken cooked by lamp oil
In order to better preserve the original taste of ingredient, salt was the only condiment that Du Chengxing supposed to add into his wok while cooking the chicken. After several times of stir-frying, he gently placed the chicken into a clay pot for simmering. During the cooking, the lid should never be taken away and lamp oil needed to be added beneath every half an hour before serving.
In southwest Yunnan’s Tengchong city, there is a well-known dish named “lamp oil chicken”. What is special about this plate is that it has to be cooked by lamp oil as the fuel. The lamp oil chicken normally takes 6 hours on fire before it can finally be served onto table. But we are still curious about this dish. We want to know where it comes from and how it has become a popular dish in Tengchong. Therefore, we traveled to the Jietou township in Tengchong to unveil the secret of this traditional lamp oil chicken with Du Chengxing, a renowned local chef.
When we arrived at the door of Du’s house, he firstly served us with hot green tea. According to him, there is a peculiar plant growing in Tengchong, and the locals call it the “fragrant fruit tree”. The tree bears tiny fruits which have long been employed by local residents for medical and culinary uses. These fruits are golden in color and contain a special fragrance. They are also an important ingredient for making the so called lamp oil chicken.
According to Du Chengxing, lamp oil chicken is not difficult to be cooked, if certain steps are followed. But making a perfect lamp oil chicken is undoubtedly a huge challenge, especially for people who are not familiar with this dish, because only local chefs know how to choose, cut and cook chicken properly. Mr. Du soon started to show us how to cook lamp oil chicken in his kitchen. He quickly cut the chicken into chunks and stir-fried it with the oil extracted from those fragrant fruits being mentioned above. “This oil can help remove the unpleasant smell of raw chicken,” Du Chengxing explained to us.
In order to better preserve the original taste of ingredient, salt was the only condiment that Du supposed to add into his wok while cooking the chicken. After several times of stir-frying, he gently placed the chicken into a clay pot for simmering. During the cooking, the lid should never be taken away and lamp oil needed to be added beneath every half an hour before serving. “I had been experimenting for years before I finally knew how to control the fire properly,” Mr. Du said.
After nearly 6 hours of simmering in the clay pot, the oil lamp chicken was eventually ready to be served. We could literally hear different ingredients moving up and down in the pot before the lid was removed. When Du Chengxing finally placed this whole pot of chicken on dinner table, a strong fragrance came out and started to pervade in the house. By looking at the dish, you could find that the chicken was covered by a thick layer of oil. This is a mixture of melted chicken oil and fragrant fruit oil. One should start enjoying this dish by drinking a bowl of chicken soup first. What it would give you is a mixed flavor of chicken of fragrant fruit. This is oil lamp chicken, a special dish prevailing in Tengchong, southwest Yunnan province.
Although it would take up to 6 hours to prepare this plate, Du Chengxing has attracted an increasing number of customers from both Tengchong and other parts of Yunnan to enjoy oil lamp chicken at his place. Every time when they ask him for how long they will need to wait for cooking, Du Chengxing always responds: “please be more patient, good food always takes time to be cooked.”
Writing by Gong Jingyang; trans-editing by Wang Jingzhong; photographs by Meng Zhigang