CHICKEN WITH A BANG
Famous Chinese street-food sauce gives this dish a big hit of flavour
A few weeks back, I was ordering lunch at a seafood joint when I spied a peculiarly named appetizer, “bang bang” shrimp.
As a student of Chinese cooking, I recognized the name, so I gave it a try. What appeared several minutes later were deepfried prawns tossed in a creamy mixture of garlic, ginger, ground chilies and mayonnaise.
Sure, the name of this increasingly popular dish evokes an exotic ode to explosive Asian heat, but no matter how delicious the snack may be, Chinese cooks would be confounded.
Deep-fried? Mayonnaise? Spicy? Heck, in China, despite its fiery name, “bang bang” doesn’t even refer to flavour!
Sometimes a Chinese dish is named for its evocative appearance (“lion’s head” meatballs), at times for stunning folklore (“barbarian head” buns) and, in a few brilliant examples, for the sound made when the food is being prepared.
Bang bang chicken’s name derives from the age-old noise of a baton smacking a whole cooked bird, breaking it into serving portions, where a kitchen cleaver just wouldn’t cut it (evenly).
Chicken busted up in such a fashion is indeed bang bang, with or without a dressing.
Over the centuries, however, the legendary name has come to mean the fully dressed masterpiece with a signature sauce.
Traditionally, the five flavours in Chinese cookery are salty, sour, sweet, spicy and bitter.
Where a single meal should present a balance of these elements, it’s remarkable when a single sauce embraces all five, and in a humble street snack at that.
Today, where most bang bang chicken vendors sell from namebrand stalls at morning markets, their history runs deep.
Ingenious southwestern cooks during the Ming Dynasty struck alchemy: simple poached chicken and a combination of soy sauce, sugar, vinegar, chili oil, Sichuan peppercorn and sesame paste.
Virtually every modern bang bang vendor has a unique twist on the formula, yet the ingredients and overall effect remain. (And, in case you’re wondering, it’s quite different from Laotian bang bang sauce, which doesn’t include a creamy element.)
When I began my China wandering in the 1990s, I enjoyed more than my fill of devilishly spicy Sichuan specialties.
But the first time I tried a properly dressed bang bang chicken, it was as if my palate had suddenly graduated from grammar school, skipped high school entirely and was now enlisted in Sichuan University.
My understanding of Sichuan cuisine moved from the idea of the stereotypical incendiary fare to the appreciation of it as a rich and complex cuisine that just so happened to occasionally burn the tongue out of your mouth.
There is hardly another Chinese sauce that evokes such perfection: spicy but not burning, sweet but not cloying, bitter but not disarming, sour but not puckering, salty but not oceanic.
A decade later, while backpacking around Sichuan Province, I found my way to Dave’s Oasis, a foreigner’s refuge in the heart of the capital, Chengdu.
The owner, Dave Fan, was a wide-ranging resource for the lost. If you needed an entry permit for Tibet, tips on navigating the pre-smartphone urban jungle or just an ice-cold Snow beer, Fan was your guy and his Oasis was your oasis.
On an average day, well before fusion was a thing, Fan would be whipping up mapo tofu pizza, cheeseburger fried rice or my favourite, grilled bang bang chicken.
Fan was born and raised in Chengdu, but grilling the meat could be seen as heretical in Chinese gastronomy, where preserving the character of an individual ingredient is sacrosanct and poaching or steaming chicken is the ultimate in preservation.
Though examples abound of grilled snacks in the Chinese street food playbook, masking the flavour of expertly charred meat with anything more than a dry dusting of spice, or maybe chili oil, is well outside of the norm.
And, in the case of Fan’s bang bang chicken, genius. As Fan said, “Every cuisine has its strengths. We can learn a lot by teaming them up!”
I’m pretty sure Fan was just experimenting at the grill that day, but it left an indelible mark on my mind and my palate.
Most of my barbecue slatherings from cookouts past sang a single note of sweet, sour or spicy with maybe a bit of overlap.
Bang bang sauce changes the tune by bringing along bitter and salty for perfect harmony. And frankly, the origin tale offers a great story the next time you have folks over for a backyard shindig.
Bang bang dressing is a solid match for chicken hot off the grill, but it also pairs brilliantly with poached or roasted poultry, toasty vegetables and tofu, as well as more dense seafood, such as shrimp and scallops.
Sichuan chili oil makes a great accompaniment for this chicken and sauce; you can also use it instead of the store-bought red chili oil.