Foochow Red Wine Chicken (红糟鸡)

红糟鸡, aka Glutinous Red Wine Chicken, is my absolute favourite Foochow dish, and that is as Foochow as I get, because I was brought up more with the Cantonese influence on things and speak the latter dialect instead of the former.

But this dish, is gold to me. Perhaps because of it’s rarity in Singapore too. It’s not something you find easily available in hawker centres, and even if you do, the quality is often lacking. The key ingredient, the red glutinous wine residue (or lees as they term it) is hard to get. In recent years, I found a China-made version which I thought was really quite edible, but nothing compares to the ones my mum brings back from Malaysia when she visits. Look at the deep red colour of the residue, the taste is rich and carries depth. My mum gets them from my auntie, who gets them from Sitiawan, a small town in Malaysia, where the Foochow influence is still strong.