Sichuan hot chicken

I wrote about lazi ji & the fiction of “Sichuan hot chicken” — a Panda Express special back in 2019, inspired by Nashville hot chicken & likely unrecognizable to anyone in Sichuan: white-meat strips, carefully shorn of all reminders that an animal once clucked & tottered across this earth, pulled nubbly & bronzed from the deep fryer & given a shake of carmine dust. Other food outlets soon took up the idea, with “Sichuan hot chicken” popping up from Columbia, S.C., to Wenatchee, Wash. “Sichuan” became a shorthand for a vaguely Asian spiciness, achieved via a quick slug of chile oil or sriracha (which is Thai in origin).

But was there a real Sichuan hot chicken? I consulted the food scholar Fuchsia Dunlop. Lazi ji, she said — a folk specialty of Chongqing (once part of Sichuan, now autonomous), a sweltering city of tormenting hills, scaled by stairs & churning escalators, including the second-longest in Asia, with a change in altitude equivalent to more than 10 stories. Life in Sichuan may be hot, but in Chongqing, it’s hotter, & so is the food. “The first time you encounter this dish, it appears terrifyingly spicy,” Dunlop writes in her 2003 cookbook, “Land of Plenty.” She’s had it on a tray big enough to speak to satellites, the chiles spilling rim to rim in reckless abundance, bright as fresh blood. But you’re not meant to eat them. Part of the fun is hunting for the small, crispy nubs of chicken, which come with the bones left in, for happy grappling. And the chiles are fried only briefly, just long enough to give off their fragrance & lend the cooking oil a little sting.

Dunlop advises staying away from the most powerful chiles, the ones that can induce near hallucinations. Seek out the long, slender, medium-hot variety sold by the bag at Chinese groceries. Just be careful they don’t blacken in the wok. You want that red, untainted, unextinguished, blazing on the plate.