Qingping Chicken

Qingping Chicken

　　"Qingping Chicken" is one of Guangzhou’s famous "century-old brand" specialty food items, made from Qingyuan farm-raised chickens using a variety of cooking methods, but the most popular is the plain-boiled Qingping Chicken. The "Qingping Chicken" brand was originally owned by the state-owned enterprise "Qingping Restaurant," which registered it as a trademark in 1987. After the Qingping Restaurant Group Company went bankrupt in 2002, the trademark came under the ownership of a state-owned enterprise.

　　 Plain-boiled Qingping Chicken is renowned for preserving the chicken’s original sweet and fresh flavors through a unique preparation method that involves soaking the chicken in a specially prepared white brine infused with medicinal herbs and spices, as well as aging chicken broth and an ice-water bath. It is famous worldwide for being "crispy-skinned, tender-fleshed, and flavorful right down to the bone." Hence, the term "Qingping Chicken" is also commonly understood to refer to this distinctive method of preparing plain-boiled chicken.

　　As for the Cantonese school of cuisine (excluding the Hakka-style "Dongjiang cuisine"), the representative example is Guangzhou’s "Qingping Chicken." This dish is cooked in aged brine and then cooled in cold brine. In English, this style of dish is referred to as "tender boiled chicken with soy sauce," which is likely a reference to the brine-soaked "Qingping Chicken." To accurately describe authentic "plain-boiled chicken," one may simply use the first part of the phrase: "tender boiled chicken."