Duck meat taste sweet and cool, has the effect of nourishing the yin and nourishing the stomach, water and swelling, and the custom of eating duck in the summer has been passed down. Folk eating summer duck, there are many ways to eat: white cut duck, lemon duck, ginger duck, roast duck, lotus duck, walnut duck and so on. Camphor tea duck is a traditional sichuan dish, which has been famous throughout the province as early as the 1940s.
In Chengdu, there is a saying of "South Road Duck North Road Chicken". There is a lot of water in the south of Chengdu, and there are many mountains in the north, so the duck fat on the south road and the chicken on the north road are tender. After the chef makes the south duck, the skin is crispy and tender, the taste is delicious, and there is a strong special aroma. This dish is made of Chengdu South Road duck, made with black tea, sugar, shaojiu, green onion, ginger, cinnamon, star anise and other more than a dozen raw materials, and then smoked by camphor wood chips and leaves, so it is called camphor tea duck. Its skin is crispy and tender, the color is rosy, the taste is delicious, and it has a special aroma of camphor tea.
There is a professional pickled duck shop in Chengdu, the owner's surname is Zhang, known as Zhang Duck. But Zhang is a big surname, a big Chengdu, selling pickled duck hundreds of houses, countless signs, it is difficult to distinguish between true and false. In order to show the difference, the old buyer added the place where Zhang Duck was sold to the front, calling it "Rat Hole Zhang Duck". The owner of the Zhang Duck Shop in Rats Cave is named Zhang Guoliang, who sold roast duck with his father in front of the Rats Cave on Titus Street in 1928. In 1931, it was moved to the door of the "Gangdong Bath" opposite at that time, and was named "Fuluxuan". The following year, his father last year, he took two brothers to support the business, which is a famous local long-established camphor tea duck shop.
Rat Cave Zhang Duck Shop makes camphor tea ducks to select delicate and tender ducks, to purify the blood and remove the hair. Make a small hole under the wing and remove the internal organs. The legs are made of bamboo skewers, and the legs are slightly cooked in a pot of boiling water. Smoked in a smoker with camphor leaves and jasmine tea dust. After cooking, it is steamed in a basket, then fried in oil to make it brownish red, taken out and slaughtered into small pieces, plated into a duck shape, and brushed with sesame oil.
When eating camphor tea duck, it should generally be served with a sauce dish of onion sauce and eaten with lotus leaf cake. Lotus leaf cake is a small cake steamed from the noodles, the taste is soft, the taste is light, the color is white, and the camphor tea duck has a crisp taste, a strong taste, brownish red color, and the contrast between the visual touch and taste of the lotus leaf cake, plus the dipping of onion sauce, is even more fried. In addition, camphor tea duck also pays attention to hot eating, fried and eaten, so that camphor tea taste is more intense, if you drink another cup of fine wine, slowly eat it, then the duck taste is indeed incomparable.
Many Chinese and foreign customers have tasted camphor tea duck and praised it, saying that it is comparable to Peking duck. When Sichuan celebrity chefs visited Hong Kong, many customers praised this dish after eating it, saying that it was "a Sichuan famous dish that integrates color, aroma, taste and shape", which caused a great sensation from people from all walks of life, and its reputation gradually spread overseas.
Sichuan chefs mostly use camphor tea duck as one of their own dishes. In 1954, Sichuan chef Fan Junkang accompanied Premier Zhou Enlai to Geneva and hosted a banquet for The Chaplins and his wife at the beautiful Huashan Villa on the shores of Lake Lémon. When the Zhangcha duck was served, Chaplin was overjoyed. After tasting it, he repeatedly praised and said: "The duck is beautiful and crispy, and it is really good in color, aroma, taste and shape." After the meal, Chaplin was still excited. He said: "Today was a very pleasant day to eat satisfactorily and have a good conversation. Then, in a rather regretful and regretful tone, he said, "The fly in the ointment is that I still have a child who has not come and has not been able to taste the delicious Food of China." He said it carelessly, but Premier Zhou Enlai listened to it, but then instructed the staff to wrap another prepared Zhangcha duck and burnt cake, and let chaplin's family bring it back to the children who did not come to taste it. This scene made Chaplin extremely excited and surprised.
Kong Daosheng, Zhang Deshan, Chen Zhigang and other famous chefs in Sichuan, who went to the Czech Republic and North Korea in the 1950s and 1960s to teach cooking techniques, all taught camphor tea duck.