Drunken Chicken
Poached chicken steeped for a day in Shaoxing wine and its own jellied stock, then sliced cold. Shanghai in summer, and it needs no cooking on the day.
Photograph credit: Drunken Chicken and fixins by digitalprimate · CC BY 2.0 · Flickr
Photograph credit: Drunken Chicken by fra-NCIS · CC BY 2.0 · Flickr
The Method for Drunken Chicken
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Bring the water to the boil with the ginger, spring onions, salt and peppercorns.
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Lower in the chicken, simmer 5 minutes, then cover, take the pan off the heat and let it poach in the residual heat for 30 minutes.
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Lift the chicken straight into a bowl of iced water and leave 10 minutes, until completely cold.
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Strain 300 ml of the poaching stock and cool it completely.
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Mix the cooled stock with the Shaoxing wine, sugar, salt, ginger, spring onion and goji berries. Do not heat it.
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Cut the chicken into large pieces, on the bone, and submerge them in the marinade.
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Refrigerate 24 hours, turning once.
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Lift the pieces out, slice them, and spoon a little of the jellied marinade over. Scatter with coriander.
Related guide: Prep, cook and total time.
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Things to Watch For
- Iced water straight after poaching. It sets the skin.
- Never heat the marinade. Heat takes the wine with it.
- A full day in the fridge, and the jelly is part of the dish.
Ingredient Swaps
- Out of spring onions? A small regular onion, finely sliced, or a few chives stirred in at the end both cover the job.
- If you only have ground ginger, a quarter-teaspoon for each tablespoon of fresh is the ratio usually given; it tastes warmer and less bright than the fresh root.
A Little Background
Chill the poached chicken in iced water before it goes into the wine. The shock sets the skin into the springy, slightly gelatinous texture that is half the point of the dish, and it stops the residual heat carrying the meat past done. The wine marinade is never heated with the chicken in it either — heat drives off the alcohol and most of the aroma, and the whole character of drunken chicken is raw Shaoxing wine against cold set stock.
To Go With It
A cold beer · Smashed cucumber · Steamed rice
Leftovers
Refrigerated in its marinade for 4 days. Do not freeze.
Common Questions
How long does Drunken Chicken take to make?
25 minutes of preparation and 35 minutes of cooking, plus 24 hours of steeping the chicken in the wine marinade, so allow 25 hours from start to finish. The method also needs time for cooling completely, which it does not time, so treat that as a minimum. The recipe serves 6.
Drunken Chicken Nutrition
No nutrition figures are given for this recipe: they cannot be worked out reliably from its ingredient list (some ingredient lines cannot be read). Why some recipes have none.
Your notes on this recipe
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Compiled by Turab
Checked by script for timings, diet labels and nutrition arithmetic. How the recipes are checked. Found a mistake? Tell us.
First published ; last changed .
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