Jiaohua Ji (Beggar's Chicken Baked in Lotus Leaf and Clay)

Variations

• Real clay: the original method, and what the photograph shows — the shell cracked open with a mallet at the table. If you use clay at home, use only clay you know the source of. If you do not, the dough is the safe choice.
• In a campfire: how the story begins. The parcel goes into the embers under the fire. You cannot judge that heat, so allow more time than in an oven.
• Fuguiji: the dish's other name, meaning rich and noble chicken — a beggar's chicken eaten by the rich.
• Without the stuffing: it bakes a little faster and the leaf's aroma goes more directly into the meat.
• The Qianlong story: the legend that spread the name has the emperor, travelling in disguise, smelling a clay-wrapped chicken cooking under a campfire and having it dug up.

Tips

• The clay is there to take the fire so the leaf does not have to. Putting a leaf parcel into a fire is not new. Ikan pepes steams first and only then puts the parcel on the coals — "Four or five minutes a side, until the leaf is blackened and dry." Steaming records the limit: "Reverse the order and the leaf is ash before the fish is cooked." A leaf lasts in a fire about as long as a piece of fish takes. A whole bird takes hours. For those hours the clay takes the fire, and the leaf, inside it, gives aroma instead of burning.
• The clay is an earthenware pot shaped to the bird. Dry heat and moist heat gathers the dishes that cook in the food's own moisture. In kedjenou "the earthenware pot is sealed and not a drop of water goes in." Bougna is "wrapped in banana leaves and buried, with no liquid but coconut milk." Jiaohua ji puts the two together: the leaf is bougna's, and the clay is kedjenou's earthenware, only moulded to the shape of the bird. Bougna buries the parcel in the earth; this puts the earth on the parcel.
• Which is why the time is long and the heat moderate. What heat control says of the ttukbaegi holds for this shell — "slow to heat and slow to let go". A centimetre of dough lets heat in slowly and keeps warming the inside after it comes out of the oven, which is why it rests ten minutes. The long cook suits the legs. Cooking meat: "chicken thigh is actually better near 80°C, where its connective tissue softens."
• A gap is the failure. Bougna has already written this family's rule: "any leak and two hours of cooking still gives you dry food." Press the dough seams shut and patch every crack. The parchment inside the leaves is there so the juices do not soak into the dough and away.
• The lotus leaf is an ingredient, not a container. Lo mai gai draws the line: "Banana leaf is a container; a lotus leaf is an ingredient." And "Aroma compounds are volatile, and inside a closed parcel there is nowhere for them to go but into the rice." Here there is nowhere for it to go but into the bird. Soaking dried leaves is the same as there.
• Cool the stuffing first, for lo mai gai's reason: "A hot filling condenses on the inside of the leaf and the rice goes sodden" — here it is the inside of the bird that goes soggy.
• Cracking it open is part of the dish. Bougna: "At a Kanak gathering, opening the parcel is part of the dish." This one takes a mallet, and the lotus smell comes up all at once as the shell breaks.