Grilled chicken with bamboo rice is one of the famous mountain specialties of the Central Highlands. This dish is currently prepared in many different versions, but still retains the delicious, sweet taste of chicken and the aroma of sticky rice.

The chicken used to make grilled chicken is usually free-range young chicken, weighing about 1kg, with firm meat and thin skin. After preliminary processing, the chicken is marinated thoroughly with typical spices such as garlic, shallots, lemongrass, five-spice powder, pepper, fish sauce, salt, honey and especially indispensable forest leaves.

The marinade is the secret to making grilled chicken of the Central Highlands more special. After the marinade has absorbed the spices, the chicken is grilled. The grilling method is also an important process that determines the flavor of this specialty dish.

The chicken is clamped to a bamboo stem instead of placed on a grill, then directly placed into the hot coals. The charcoal used to grill the chicken must be wood charcoal so that when grilled, it has a fragrant smoky smell. When grilling, the chef must constantly turn and add charcoal to ensure the fire is just right, so that the chicken is cooked and has a golden brown color.

Besides grilled chicken, to cook the perfect bamboo rice dish, the indispensable ingredient is sticky rice. The sticky rice used is usually the small, long grain sticky rice of the Central Highlands ethnic people grown on the fields. Delicious sticky rice will have a light aroma, a sweet taste, the grains must be round, plump, not broken and have a milky white color. In addition, choosing bamboo tubes for processing is also very important. The bamboo tubes or young bamboo tubes chosen must be fresh, with a dark green outer shell, small and long body, then when grilled, the bamboo rice dish will have a delicious characteristic flavor.

Before cooking, the sticky rice must be soaked in water for 4-6 hours, then washed again and drained before being put into the bamboo tube (not too full) and sealed with banana leaves at one end. The sticky rice will be grilled at the same time as the chicken on the charcoal stove. When grilling, the bamboo rice tubes are placed on the charcoal stove and rotated evenly so that the rice is cooked evenly and does not burn. When the grilled chicken begins to give off an attractive aroma, the fragrant and soft bamboo rice tubes are also cooked.

The way the Central Highlands people decorate their dishes is usually quite simple. The bamboo rice tubes are cut into pieces and arranged on a plate. The grilled chicken, after draining the fat, is also placed on a tray with a bowl of peanut salt and perilla leaf salt. The chicken is served whole so that diners can tear it apart when enjoying. Peanut salt is eaten with the bamboo rice, and perilla leaf salt (a type of leaf that smells similar to basil) is used to dip the grilled chicken to make the flavor more delicious and rich.

According to Công Đạt (Báo ảnh Việt Nam/Vietnam+)