A Guide to Cooking a Whole Chinese Chicken | White Cut Chicken and Ginger Scallion Oil | 白切鸡

Hi everyone. Today we're going to show you how to cook a whole Chinese chicken or poached chicken, what we call in the Cantonese bà jì gài. And you may have seen your parents, regardless of whether you're Cantonese or not, you may have seen your parents or your grandparents cook this chicken and maybe you're not sure about the exact directions of what it is. But you know, we're going to give you a guide to cooking this chicken. And I just want to show you that that this recipe is complete inside our latest cookbook, The Walks of Life Cookbook, Recipes to Know and Love from the Chinese-American Family, and that's us. But right here is the page that shows you all the details. But I'm going to give you some more details and more tips and tricks on how to do it. First off, foremost, what you have to do is you have to start with what's called a Buddhist style chicken. It's a whole chicken with the head on and feet on. You can get it at many Chinese grocery stores. In this case, we got a fresh chicken from our friend Anita over at Bobo Poultry. And you can see how beautiful it is. The texture and flavor is quite different, even from a high quality organic chicken or free range chicken that you get in the grocery store. This chicken tastes silkier than a chicken from the grocery store. And that has to do with breed. We learned from Anita. It also has to do with the time that they took to raise this. They're raised in a 12-week cycle, which gives them time to mature. So we've got a fresh chicken from fresh Buddhist chicken from Bobo Poultry right in time for Lunar New Year. So every year, we've always had a poached white cut chicken, bai qian qi or ba qi gai. Every year, when I was a kid, we used to go to Chinatown to make the trek to Chinatown from upstate New York. And we used to go and buy at least probably two or three of these chickens that we'd cook the day after we got back. And then we'd throw these in the freezer and cook them on other occasions as well. Because we probably went to New York City about once a month. I'm going to show you the next generation so you can continue the tradition of cooking this Lunar New Year or anytime you want to poach chicken. So let's get to it. Last year, we had the pleasure of meeting Anita Lee, second generation owner of Bobo Poultry. It's a New York City institution that's been around since 1985 and has been quietly serving the five boroughs of New York with fresh, slow-grown heritage breed poultry. This isn't your average mainstream American chicken. This is the classic quote-unquote Chinatown chicken. That is, with head and feet on, that's the centerpiece of holidays and family gatherings for countless Chinese families. Is this the same as like a baby chicken? Because sometimes I see like baby chicken. No, baby chicken is younger. It's younger? This is the iconic chicken. But that's, these two are the same, but this one's frozen and that's fresh. Gotcha. Lovely. When we first met Anita, we talked a lot about how delicious her Buddhist-style chickens are and also how important it is that the younger generations know how to cook a Chinese-style whole chicken. The meat is more flavorful, firm, and silky. Somehow silky is just the best way to describe it. It's far and away the most tender and delicious chicken that we've ever had. And when special family dinners, holidays, and gatherings roll around, we always know to head to our local Chinatown for a Buddhist-style chicken like the ones at Bobo Poultry. Now this Bobo chicken, we just got this Bobo chicken from Anita and it says Buddhist-style chicken from Bobo Poultry Market. I'm gonna see if I can process it, but it's very clean, beautiful color. It comes whole with the whole head and the feet. So tuck the end to the cavity. I'm gonna carefully take this out and inside, this has to be rinsed and cleaned. I'm gonna take the, I always like to take the, clean the cavity and take the kidneys out and the other organs that are stuck to the cavity because it's a much more pleasant eating experience when you do that. So I'm gonna give it a quick rinse. And for all those people who are concerned about salmonella, we keep the kitchen very clean and we clean up afterwards, wash our hands and disinfect. So if you see in here at the bottom, I'm gonna shut this water off, if you see in here at the bottom, these two, these two organs down here, I already started taking them out, are the kidneys of the organ and sometimes I'll save them and give them to barley. This is a very fresh chicken and a fresh chicken should not, just like fish, it should not smell like anything else. It's not pretty, but you know, it has to be done. So look at the beauty of this, the color of this chicken and the freshness. Very nice. I'll take a little bit of this fat off, but there's really not that much fat that's stuck on there. This was already cleaned. If people are squeamish about pulling the organs out with gums, can they do like a spoon or something? No, they can, but you know, I just think it's just counterproductive. Now this is extra skin that was not taken out, this. So the skin does have to be, should be taken out. It's normal cleaning procedure for chickens like this. Just like when you go to the fish monger and you got extra scales on there and then you want to give it another scraping. Disinfecting. All right, all clean again. We've got water here. Supposed to fill it up with enough water just to cover the chicken. You just put the chicken in with cold water, make sure it's submerged and then take it back out. Simple as that. But what I've got is some two old scallions here that I've chopped up and five slices of ginger. Put that in here. We're just going to turn this water on to a full boil and then we're going to put the chicken in. But gotta wait for the water to boil first. All right, so now we've got our boiling water and we're ready to put the chicken. What I like to do is I like to tuck the wings back, the back of the chicken. It has a little bit of a place to mount and a couple of options, whatever you're comfortable with. You can use a fork underneath the wings, lift them up. You can also use chopsticks or you can use two spoons and just tuck it under the wing, under the armpit like this, on the other side and then you lift it up like this and lower it. That's another way. Or what I do and what my mom used to do, we'd lift it up by the feet and I just put it in like this and then make sure you tip it, okay, so that all the water, all the air comes out of it and then just carefully lower it in just like that. It's okay if the feet's stuck up a little bit, don't worry about it. We're going to cover it and bring everything back to a boil and then once everything comes to a boil, what we're going to do is then lift the chicken out and what happens is that all that water that was been cooled down in the cavity gets poured out and reheated and then you're going to lower the chicken and then this cooks the chicken much more evenly. So we'll let this come back up to the boil and then we'll do our thing. Now it's time to lift the chicken up so that the cooled water in the cavity can reheat. So what I like to do is I like to use a spoon, a long spoon, which makes it I think a bit easier and you stick it in the cavity and then you sort of slowly and actually you can use another spoon or a fork underneath the wing carefully just to lift it up, pour the water out just like that and then simply put it right back in. And if you're using a fork, you got to stick it in the, put it under the armpit and be careful that you're not piercing the skin because you want that to be intact. Now I know you young folks are a little bit freaked out here with the chicken feet sticking out of the pot here. Believe me, mom and grandma never even flinched when they did that so you're okay. Just kind of tuck this in, the cover in, put it back in, cook the chicken for the other 40 minutes on a just simmer. You do not want that water even to simmer. You just want it to be just below simmering. That's how you do it. Okay, chicken's about ready. 40 minutes. It's about, so no simmering really. It's about just over 200 degrees the water if you want to be technical about it. So hopefully I'll take this out with the spoon and poke it. Nothing red coming out. So between no red juices coming out, no pink juices coming out and the time, you're pretty accurate. So now what we want to do is give it a little ice bath, make the skin crunchy. Plunge it into this ice bath, give it a turn over and make sure, and what this does is it gives you a nice crunchy skin Cantonese love it. It's called, you know, the skin is crunchy. That's what they like. I like it too. So we're going to keep this in here a little bit longer. No, we're good. Ice hasn't melted yet. It doesn't have to be in for too long a time and meanwhile I'm going to get a plate and I'll plate this. Oh, right here. You know, these feet, you know, at this point you can, you can cut these off. You want, just, just bend them a little bit at the joint and you can cut them off like this with a cleaver, put them on the side. Some elders going to gnaw on that with soy sauce. I don't know. Maybe, maybe when you young people get a little bit older, you might say that your grandma wasn't so nuts gnawing on this. Okay. So now I'm just going to use my hands and let it, it's all nice and cool now. And my parents used to set the chicken up like on this, on its, on its breast, just like that. And actually when you, during Qingming, this is actually what you do when you, when you have a red, for the Qingming festival, when you honor your ancestors. There you have it. Let it cool off and then we can cut this. While the chicken is cooling, I'm making some ginger scallion sauce. A little chopping. I like, I like chopping it fine, but it's all personal preference. Some people like to use a, have you been known to use a food processor, a little whip, but you know, it kind of emulsifies things kind of like little bits and chunks of ginger and scallion together. So I'm going to transfer this to a bowl and I'm going to add a little bit of salt, maybe like a teaspoon of salt, but it's personal preference, maybe a teaspoon of salt and some oil, neutral oil. And then we'll stir that up and serve that with the chicken. Okay, so we're going to cut the chicken. It's cooled. And this is how it's done. Set aside half for later. Okay. bà jì gài. If you look at this, this actually is cooked through and through perfectly. If the bones are a little bit pink, usually they're fine. In fact, a lot of Cantonese, especially in China, the bones are clearly pink because the belief is that you're not eating the bone anyway. The, and if you cook the bone, like if you cook the chicken all the way down to the bone like this, it's overcooked, but this is great. When you cook a fresh chicken, it's really, really makes a huge difference. Enjoy. That chicken is killer. Oh, it didn't get overcooked. I mean, that chicken is good. Any one of these pieces are good. So good. It melts in your mouth. Silky, silky, silky. So good. Great, Justin, go in there. The art of cooking a whole Chinese chicken really is an important one to preserve. And now that Sarah, and I can't believe I'm saying this, has a son, it's even more important that we learn how to pass these traditions on to the next generation. Anita told us that there's an old Hainan saying that it's not a feast without a whole chicken on the table. And we couldn't agree more. Bobo Poultry makes affordable yet premium poultry products. We could really feel the years and generations of care that go into running the family business. Thank you so much to Anita and Bobo Poultry for sponsoring this video. Real good, Anita. Bring another one over. Thank you. Hi, everyone. Today we're going to cook a show you how to cook a Chinese chicken. We're a whole chicken Chinese style. Hi, everyone. Today we've got a guide to cooking whole chicken for all you younger generations out there. Oh, that's good. We're going to show you the specific recipe from our new cookbook, The Walks of Life, Recipes to Know and Love from the Chinese American Family. Okay, that's good enough. Don't clutter my brain.