Beggar’s Chicken (jiào huā jī 叫化鸡) is a dish with an interesting history and cooking method. Beggar’s Chicken story happened long times ago. The dish created by a beggar and cook by a specific way. Beggar Chicken was origin in the late Ming and early Qing Dynasty. A beggar got a chicken one day, but didn’t have any spicy or tool to cook, so he wrapped up the chicken with slush, putting the mud pie into fire to bake and continuously collecting wood and baking mud pie. Finally, when the chicken was fully cooked, he began to knock open mud. To surprise, the feather was also falling off with mud, and the chicken smelled very nice. The beggar was happy and enjoyed a feast.
Later, Louwailou takes this cooking method and makes some improvement. The chef takes Chicken, Shaoxing’s Wine and the lotus leaf in West Lake as the material. First, they kill a fresh Chicken and clean it, add all kinds of spices, stuff condiment in chicken’s stomach, then bind it with West Lake lotus leaf, wrap it with a kind of mixture made by wine, salt water and mud from wine jar, finally bake it in steady fire for hours. The mud pile is opened in front of guests. Because the chicken is cooked in seal, the original taste is perfectly kept, and with the flavor of wine penetrating into chicken, you will feel a fragrance coming when opening the mud. Thus this dish is full of nutrition and smells very good.