The eight treasures in gourd-shaped chicken are the following eight ingredients: pork belly, bamboo shoots, dried scallops, diced shrimp, sea cucumbers, bamboo fungus, dried mushrooms and fish maws.
Gourd-shaped chicken serves as a container for the eight ingredients' flavors. [Photo/WeChat ID: zibowenhualvyou]
The Chinese word for gourd — hulu — has a sound similar to the Mandarin words for fortune and happiness, fu and lu.
To make the chicken look like a gourd, the chef needs to remove 120 bones from a 6-centimeter-long opening in the neck of a chicken without destroying its appearance. Even an experienced chef has to be very scrupulous since one small mistake can waste all the previous efforts when preparing gourd-shaped chicken, and the fine slicing techniques requires years of practice.
