Wenchang Chicken

Wenchang chicken is Hainan's most celebrated local fowl, free-ranged beneath coconut groves around Wenchang and fed on coconut flesh and banyan seeds, its flesh silky and tender with thin skin and soft bones; it heads Hainan's "four great dishes," and plain poaching is the classic treatment.

The chicken takes its name from Wenchang, its heartland, where it was already famed in the Qing dynasty; it is Hainan's most representative fowl and appears today in nearly every restaurant and farmhouse kitchen across Sanya and the island, the crowning dish of a Hainan banquet.

The classic form is plain poaching, the whole bird gently steeped until just cooked, then chopped and dipped in garlic soy, calamansi juice and sand-ginger sauce, the skin golden and the flesh white, all natural flavour; the chicken fat is also used to cook Hainan chicken rice.

The silky meat from coconut-grove ranging, the natural flavour preserved by poaching and the tart-scented calamansi-and-sand-ginger dip are the irreplaceable marks of Wenchang chicken.