Grilled chicken served with lam rice is one of the famous mountain specialties of the Central Highlands. This dish is now processed with many different versions, but still retains the delicious and sweet taste of chicken and the aroma of sticky rice.
Chickens used to make grilled chicken are usually free-range chickens, weighing about 1kg, firm meat and thin skin. After preliminary processing, the chicken is thoroughly marinated with typical spices such as garlic, red onion, lemongrass, five, flavor, pepper, fish sauce, salt, honey and especially indispensable forest leaves.
Marinated seasoning is the secret to making grilled chicken of the Central Highlands more special. After soaking in the marinade, the chicken is brought to the grill. The way of baking is also an important process that determines the taste of the dish specialties this.
The chicken is clamped to the bamboo body, not on the griddle, and then plugged directly into the embers. Charcoal grilled chicken must use charcoal to have a fragrant smoke smell when grilled. When grilling, the cook must constantly turn his hand and add charcoal to ensure the right fire, so that the chicken is cooked and has a golden color.
[Phở bò Nam Định – một trong những tinh hoa ẩm thực Việt Nam]
Besides grilled chicken, to cook the perfect lam rice dish, the indispensable ingredient is glutinous rice. The glutinous rice used is usually small, elongated upland sticky rice of the Central Highlands ethnic group grown on the upland fields. Delicious glutinous rice will have a light aroma, a sweet taste, the seeds must be round, smooth, not broken and milky white. In addition, choosing bamboo tubes for processing is also very important. The selected bamboo or young bamboo tube must be fresh, the outer skin is dark green, the body is small and long, when baking the dish. Lam rice has a unique delicious taste.
Before cooking, glutinous rice must be soaked in water for 4-6 hours, then washed again and drained, then put into bamboo tubes (do not overfill) and sealed at one end with banana leaves. Sticky rice will be grilled at the same time as the chicken on the charcoal stove. When baking, tubes of lam rice are placed on a charcoal stove and rotated by hand so that the rice cooks evenly and does not burn. When the grilled chicken begins to give off an attractive aroma, the fragrant sticky rice tubes are also cooked.
The way to decorate dishes of the Central Highlands is usually quite simple. The bamboo bamboo tubes are cut into segments and displayed on a plate. BBQ Chicken After draining the fat, it is also placed on a tray along with a cup of peanut salt and é leaf salt. Chicken is served whole for diners to tear themselves when enjoying. Peanut salt is used to serve with lam rice, and é leaf salt (a leaf with a similar smell to basil) will be used to dip with grilled chicken to make the flavor more delicious and richer.
It is great to sit and enjoy grilled chicken with lam rice in restaurants built with bold architecture and space. Tay Nguyen culture. Restaurants often sell from noon to late at night, the price of each grilled chicken served with lam rice is about 300,000 VND.
Cong Dat (Vietnam Photo Newspaper/Vietnam+)