Salt-baked chicken

The no-fuss version!

One of the most underrated dishes in Singapore, in my opinion, is salt-baked chicken 盐焗鸡. You’ll find it at zichar restaurants like Kian Seng, alongside other more flashy dishes, or at one of the few eateries that specialise in the dish such as Lam’s Kitchen. I always order it when I see it on the menu because it is such a flavour-packed yet uncommon dish.

At its core is just two ingredients - salt and chicken. The Hakkas - the nomadic community that this dish is attributed to - had no access to ovens in the past. In a demonstration of their ability to cook in transit, they covered chicken in a salt crust and buried it in a hollow dug into the ground.

When the community later settled in Guangdong, a wok took the place of the pit. Coarse salt was fried in a wok until it is very hot and the chicken, wrapped snugly in layers of greaseproof paper or foil, would be covered completely with it. Once cooked, the wrapped chicken would be taken to the table, the wrapper ripped apart and the meat torn from the carcass.

While this tradition continues in some Cantonese and Hakka kitchens, modern versions of the dish often do not live up to the dish’s name. In some recipes, the “salt-baked chicken” is poached in a salt solution. Other times, the coarse salt that the chicken traditionally bakes in is entirely done away with. Luckily, the times that I’ve eaten this dish in zichar restaurants, it is very good.

It might seem curious to still persist with this tradition even when most of us have ovens in our homes today, but the wrapping of the chicken renders it half-roasted, half-steamed, similar to cooking en papillote in the West. All the juices and aromas are trapped within the package. The salt allows even cooking, so while the chicken emerges from the oven completely pale, the flesh is incredibly smooth, a trait that the Chinese prize.

What makes this different, then, to something like white-cut chicken (the style of chicken in your chicken rice)? To me, salt-baked chicken tends to have an inexplicable aroma that comes from the toasted salt, particularly when it is cooked on the stovetop. The direct cooking causes the salt to char lightly; the smoky flavour penetrates the wrapped chicken in the confines of the wok. Salt-baked chicken also leans slightly salty, tasting almost cured, which puts it firmly in the rice thief category of food. Someone who prepared the recipe when I first posted it told me she had never tasted chicken like this and was mindblown at how something so simple could taste so complex.

Apart from salt and the chicken, there is one ingredient that people tend to talk about when talking about this dish - sand ginger. Also known as kencur or sha jiang in Singapore, the fragrance of this ginger is very unique, almost medicinal. If you’re keen on a recipe that uses fresh sand ginger, there is one in my book Wet Market to Table. Alternatively, you can use sand ginger powder or salt-baked chicken seasoning sold in packets at your Asian grocer. Most often, I prepare the dish with just salt and chicken.

First, marinate your chicken with a generous amount of coarse sea salt. I’m using half a chicken here but you can also use a whole butterflied chicken. The salt exfoliates the skin of the chicken and seasons the meat.

Rinse the salt off the chicken and pat it dry. Wrap it in several layers of foil or greaseproof paper.

Place a few kilos of coarse sea salt in an ovenproof pot or deep saucepan (a Dutch oven is perfect). Roast it in the oven until the temperature of the salt reaches 220°C.

When the salt is hot enough, remove almost all of it, leaving just a thin layer on the bottom of the pan or pot. Nestle the wrapped package in the centre and pour over the rest of the hot salt to bury it. Turn off the oven, and allow the covered pot to sit in the oven’s residual heat.

After an hour, here’s what the chicken will look like, unwrapped:

The leftover salt can be used in other applications such as making pickles or adding to water when cooking pasta.

Allow the chicken to cool slightly, then chop or hand-shred it. Traditionally, the chicken is served with a ginger scallion dipping sauce, but our fridge is bare. I mixed in some bentong ginger powder into the juices and spooned that over the chicken:

Definitely serve with rice. We also plucked some lettuce from the garden to wrap the chicken with. It’s incredible how much flavour a dish with three ingredients - salt, chicken, and bentong ginger powder - can have.

Salt-baked chicken
Serves 3-4

For half a chicken:
Half of a chicken, weighing about 750g, best-quality and free-range
2kg coarse sea salt