There are several small shops in the town that specialize in hand-torn chickens, and I am a regular customer of these shops. I've been visiting the chicken-torn shop for about twelve or three years.
At first, I thought that hand-torn chicken was a Cantonese dish, but later I learned from some diners that my understanding was wrong. In fact, hand-torn chicken is a Sichuan-style cold dish. It was only in Guangdong that the Cantonese people, who were addicted to chickens, integrated the salt baked recipe with local characteristics into it, and achieved a salty and crispy Cantonese-style salt-baked hand-torn chicken.
Golden skin can be described as one of the selling points of hand-torn chicken, on the golden chicken skin, crystal and sweet, delicate meat, moderate oil, delicious and juice, chewed neither greasy nor hard, and with a strong fresh flavor, up to the bone marrow. It is drier than the average chicken dish and is easy to reconcile. Hand-torn chicken this chicken delicacy, compared to other chicken delicacies, that is, no stew or stir-fry, it can make the umami taste in the chicken get the best guarantee. Hand-torn chicken is a cold dish, but also a hard dish. It is said that chicken is rich in protein amino acids, while supplementing nutrition, it can also improve immunity, sweat more in summer, and eat chicken is a big benefit.
The first time I bought a hand-torn chicken, it was more than a decade ago. It was a weekend afternoon, and I was about to go to a collector's friend to admire his collection, and my wife said to me, "If you are free, stop by the market to buy some food and come back." I said "no problem."
Collectors and friends live near the farmers' market, and looking at their friends' collections is like meeting an old friend, a bit in love. Time passed quickly, and unconsciously I spent two hours at my friend's house. When the clock was at 5 o'clock, I remembered that there was still an important task of buying vegetables that had not been completed, so I quickly said goodbye to my friends and went to the farmer's market to buy vegetables.
I bought pork and vegetables at the farmers' market and prepared to go home. Only to see that there is a Houxing Yuji hand-torn chicken shop diagonally opposite the farmer's market, newly opened, crowded, I curiously walked over to queue, the store has Sichuan-style hand-torn chicken, Cantonese salt-baked hand-torn chicken, turkey wings, chicken feet, chicken kidneys, pig ears and other varieties. After waiting for about ten minutes, I spent twenty-four yuan to buy half a Sichuan-style hand-torn chicken. At dinner, the family tasted it, and everyone thought it tasted good. The taste is unique and unique, its texture is smooth and smooth, and the bone aroma is delicate. Tender white chicken, mixed with shredded shallots, coriander, sesame seeds, pepper oil and chili peppers, has a fragrant aroma and attractive color. Even after that, I visited this hand-torn chicken shop almost every month.
The hand-torn chicken in the shop is very attractive in appearance and taste. Photo: An Rengu
After eating Sichuan-style hand-torn chicken several times, my wife said that she wanted to change the taste and turned to eat Cantonese-style salt-baked hand-torn chicken, so I bought Cantonese-style salt-baked hand-torn chicken instead according to my wife's proposal. The salt-baked hand-torn chicken not only retains the original tenderness and richness of the Sichuan style, but also pioneers the taste of an appetizer. The skin of the chicken is very smooth, even a little cool, the meat is tender and smooth, and the chicken is relatively thick to eat. Dipping ginger on the sauce to eat the taste is just right, adding to the flavor. It's a must-see.
The owner of Hou Xingyu's hand-torn chicken shop is a middle-aged woman, there are no other guys in the store, and the boss workers are all her. I bought more times, so I had to talk to her for a few words. At one point, I asked her how was the business? She replied: "The business is OK, you can sell more than a hundred hand-torn chickens every day, plus other ancillary products, such as chicken feet, chicken offal, etc., the daily turnover is seven or eight thousand yuan." "I was going to ask her further how much money she could make by deducting costs? But after thinking about it for a while, I stopped because it was someone else's trade secret. But I can deduce that the food industry, calculated at the lowest profit margin of ten percent, has a net profit of at least seven or eight hundred yuan a day. However, this is not much, a month is two or three thousand yuan, that is, a labor wage, not to mention this work is not easy, standing all day long, the hand to keep busy to tear chicken.
Don't know what's going on? A few years later, the hand-torn chicken shop closed and could no longer be found. Q Neighbors? The neighbors didn't know why.
Not long after, an old neighbor introduced to me, the Shaxi Chen Laoji hand-torn chicken shop next to the old post office, the hand-torn chicken here is all apricot blossom chicken, freshly made every day. Listening to the old neighbors say this, it seems to arouse my appetite for tearing chickens from my opponents. When I came home from work that day, I passed by this Shaxi ChenLaoji Hand-Torn Chicken Shop, and after I parked my scooter on the side of the road, I went straight to the Hand-Torn Chicken Shop. There were four or five customers waiting outside the store.
More than one meter of the store is full of glass windows, very transparent, everything in the store can be seen clearly. There was a man and a woman in their thirties who were busy wearing masks on their faces and white transparent plastic gloves on their hands. I saw that the man first chopped off the chicken head with a knife, cut the chicken in half, put it in a stainless steel basin, and began to tear the chicken. Its hand speed is very sharp, almost with lightning speed to separate the chicken and the bone, tearing it into one by one, in one go. After a few minutes, the man's master handed the torn chicken to the woman, and the woman added sesame oil, white sesame seeds, chives, coriander and other special spices to it, and kept mixing the tender white chicken to dye it, and the aroma of the ingredients came to the nose. The mixed chicken, slightly buttery, sprinkled with some white sesame seeds, looks very tempting. Finally, the woman mixed the torn chicken in a plastic lunch box.
A box is only the amount of half a chicken, and most customers buy half of it, and I am the same. Because you can't buy one to eat, and the hand-torn chicken can't be eaten overnight, the taste of eating overnight is completely changed.
This Shaxi ChenLaoJi hand-torn chicken shop has more varieties, not only hand-torn chicken, but also salted chicken, white cut chicken, chicken feet, pork belly, honey sauce char siu, roast duck, roast pig and so on. And the price is a little more expensive than several nearby hand-torn chicken shops. For example, if the hand-torn chicken is torn, another shop sells 48 yuan, and this shop sells 50 yuan. Once, I told the owner of this shop that the hand-torn chicken in your shop was more expensive than the hand-torn chicken shops, and the man smiled and said to me, "Boss, you get what you pay for." "It is true, according to the quality of the price!
Hand-torn chicken is delicious, that's a fact. Compared with the general chicken cuisine, hand-torn chicken is drier and milder in nature, suitable for different groups of people to eat. To this end, I have also tried to make hand-torn chicken. That time, I bought a three-yellow chicken, paid a fee in the private slaughterhouse next to the market, asked someone to slaughter and remove the hair, and then took it home, and processed and produced the three-yellow chicken according to the method and procedure given by "Du Niang" for the production method and procedure of the hand-torn chicken. But in the end, the homemade hand-torn chicken tastes far less delicious than the hand-torn chicken shop buys back.
Hand-torn chicken is a local traditional dish in China. Cooking is also a skill, and without special training, it makes sense that homemade hand-torn chickens are not up to the level bought from hand-torn chicken shops.
(Text/An Rengu)