Salt-Baked Chicken

This is perhaps the most famous dish of the Hakka people. The salt used in its preparation does not make the chicken salty. It is, rather, the oven that cooks the chicken. The Hakka, because they were nomads, had no ovens, so they would dig a shallow hole in the ground, place stones in it, then create an “oven” out of sea salt. I have re-created this process with salt in a Dutch oven.

Sad to say, you will seldom get genuine salt-baked chicken in restaurants, even those which call th