In the city's commercial district, the "Grandma's House" chain store, which specializes in Hangzhou's cuisine, has become more popular in recent years. Every time my family and I go to my "grandmother's house", I must order a "tea fragrant chicken", this year's epidemic has reduced eating out, but the desire for food cannot be reduced, there is no way, once again self-reliant and abundant food.
When I was studying the homemade tea chicken, I found that the management of my grandmother's family developed the tea chicken and consumed hundreds of pounds of high-grade West Lake Longjing, which can be said to have paid a lot of cost and effort. I think grandma's family specializes in Hangzhou gang cuisine, using local Longjing tea into the dish, which is very suitable for the temperament of grandma's family.
Tea has been used in the dish since ancient times.
In the "Compendium of Materia Medica": "Tea is bitter and cold, the yin in the yin, the sinking, the descending, the most able to reduce fire." Fire is a hundred diseases, and fire is clear. In "Tea Endowment": Tea has "the essence of nourishing rice and vegetables, and the greasyness of attacking meat".
There are basically four kinds of modern catering in the form of tea into the dish:
Fresh tea leaves are roasted or sautéed with ingredients such as tea chicken and Longjing shrimp
Add ingredients to the tea soup and simmer, such as tea eggs
Tea leaves are ground to make snacks, such as: green tea cakes, matcha snacks
Tea leaves are smoked, such as: camphor tea duck
The method of tea fragrant chicken is to dip the tender chicken with brewed Longjing tea and other spices, put it in a casserole pot and bake it in the oven, and mix the tea aroma forced by the high temperature when baking with the fat aroma of the chicken to form a unique aroma. The moment the whole chicken is served and torn apart, the seductive aroma spreads out, seductively under the basket, and the crispy chicken makes people's lips and teeth fragrant.
Because of the addition of tea leaves, the tea aroma contained in chicken cleverly dissolves the greasy, casserole roasting method, and preserves the tea aroma well in the whole chicken, which is the uniqueness of this dish.
Using tea into the dish and flowers into the dish is the clever use of ingredients in Chinese cuisine, which is the beauty of Chinese food culture.