Cenxi Gudian Chicken 岑溪古典鸡

Cenxi Gudian Chicken (岑溪古典鸡) is both a native free-range chicken breed of Cenxi (岑溪), a county-level city in Wuzhou (梧州), Guangxi, and the dish made from it, served in its signature restaurant form as water-steamed chicken. The Guangxi Daily describes it as the only quality local chicken breed in Guangxi with no crossbreeding from outside poultry lines. Its preparation technique entered the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region list of intangible cultural heritage in 2018.

Ingredients

The birds are small and golden all over. The Cenxi Foreign Trade Chicken Farm (岑溪市外贸鸡场), which breeds them, describes them as having a pomelo-shaped body (柚子身), a head like a paddy shrimp (禾虾头) and wiry legs (铁线脚). Farmers raise them in rotation across hill woodland and orchards. At one farm in Guiyi Town (归义镇) the birds are fed a mix of broken rice, rice bran and maize; cockerels are kept for 180 days, until they reach 2.2 kg, and hens for 130 days, until they reach 1.5 kg.

How it is made

The signature dish of the Gudian chicken restaurant chains is water-steamed chicken (水蒸鸡). The bird is killed and bled, cleaned, stripped of fat and drained, then rubbed with a seasoning mix and steamed over mountain spring water, set apart from the water, for about 25 minutes. Cooks adjust the steaming time and the proportion of the rub to the weight of each bird. At the restaurant the Guangxi Daily visited, the head chef trained under Chen Jianbo (陈健波), a recognised inheritor of intangible cultural heritage at the Guangxi regional level.

Flavour and texture

The meat is neither too fat nor too lean and is described as tender and smooth, fragrant and slightly sweet. The skin is thin, the bones are fine, there is a moderate layer of fat under the skin and the chicken flavour is strong.

Where it comes from

Cenxi is the core area for the traditional preparation technique. The Cenxi Foreign Trade Chicken Farm, founded in 1974, began developing and using the breed in 1982 and started selective breeding to improve it in 1987. In recent years chain restaurants built around the steamed chicken have spread to Nanning, Guangzhou, Shanghai and Beijing.