Qi guo ji, Jianshui steam-pot chicken

As tradition built it

Serves 4. 2.5 to 3 hours.

Ingredients

• 1 whole chicken, jointed into pieces, bone in
• 5 slices ginger
• 2 spring onions, cut into lengths
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tbsp Shaoxing wine or a dry sherry
• 1 a Jianshui-style unglazed purple-clay steam pot, or a stacked bamboo steamer over a wide pan of water

Method

1. Pack the chicken pieces, ginger, spring onion, salt and wine into the steam pot's inner chamber. Add no water or stock directly to the chicken at any point.
2. Seat the pot over a wide pan of vigorously boiling water so that steam rises through the pot's central funnel and condenses inside, dripping back down over the chicken.
3. Cover tightly and steam for 2.5 to 3 hours, topping up the boiling water below as it evaporates, never letting the pan below run dry.
4. The chicken will produce its own clear, deeply flavoured broth entirely from condensed steam and its own juices. Serve straight from the pot.

What a modern chef changes

The same closed system, held to a measured temperature.

Rung 4

Method

1. Vacuum-seal the chicken with the aromatics and a single tablespoon of Shaoxing wine, then cook sous vide at 75°C for 3 hours, a closed system in a different vessel, achieving the same slow, self-basting result with precise, repeatable timing.
2. Reduce a portion of the bag juices in a separate pan with a high-power blender's worth of blitzed ginger and spring onion, straining through a chinois for a clear, concentrated finishing sauce poured back over the chicken at the table.
3. Add a small measure of dried matsutake, rehydrated and finely sliced, to the sealed bag before cooking, echoing the tonic-ingredient version of the dish developed in twentieth-century Kunming, which added notoginseng and other tonic roots to the pot.