Big Plate Chicken

Dapanji (literally 'big plate chicken') is one of Xinjiang's most popular and widely travelled dishes — a braised chicken preparation that combines Han Chinese braising technique with Xinjiang's characteristic spice profile, producing something recognisably neither. The dish is credited to Shawan county along the northern Xinjiang highway corridor, where it became a truck-stop and long-distance traveller staple from the 1980s onwards.

A whole chicken — bone-in pieces from a free-range bird — is first flash-fried to brown the skin, then braised in a sauce of soy sauce, Sichuan peppercorn, dried red chillies, cumin, tomato paste, sugar, garlic and ginger with enough water or stock to cover. Potato chunks go in partway through the braise, absorbing the aromatic liquid as they cook. The braise takes 40–60 minutes over medium heat. The result: tender chicken in a deeply flavoured, slightly sweet-spicy, rust-red sauce, the potatoes fully cooked into the flavour of the sauce.

The dish arrives at the table on a large, rim-less plate — hence the name — with wide hand-pulled noodles laid across the top. These noodles (flat, belt-width, similar to biángbiáng from Shaanxi) are placed on the still-hot chicken and sauce, where they absorb the remaining cooking liquid and take on the colour and flavour of the braise. Diners take from both layers.

The format serves two to three people. Outside Xinjiang it is served at Xinjiang-cuisine restaurants across China, where it occupies the role of an accessible entry point into the cuisine for those unfamiliar with it. In Shawan and along the northern Xinjiang highway the portions are larger and the spice level higher.