"White Cut" Chicken with Ginger-Scallion Oil (Bai Qie Ji)

This Cantonese-style/Southern Chinese dish is either ingeniously delicious in its simplicity, deliciously simple in its ingenuity, or just plain simple and delicious (I opt for the latter). It's essentially a poached wine, salt, sesame oil-rubbed whole chicken that's sliced or perhaps hacked is a better term (I'll explain later) and served with a ginger-scallion-oil dipping sauce. Yup. That's it. No more, no less. The typical way of serving this dish is to literally hack the whole poached chicken through the bone with a Chinese cleaver into serving-sized pieces. As a result, each piece will always include some of the bone and also a layer of skin on top. That's all well and good, but I've always found the oft-fragmented & sharp pieces of bone in the meat to be well, frankly, an unnecessary distraction from the awesomeness of this dish. So, what's a girl to do? IMPROVISE, of course! I'm not the first one to come up with this idea, but poaching boneless, skinless chicken breasts for this preparation seems the perfect way to circumvent the hacked bone issue. Btw, sorry for repeatedly using the term "hack" or "hacked" here, but it's really the best way to describe what happens to this poulet poche. Poaching chicken breasts, however, is a tricky endeavor as they are so prone to overcooking at the turn of a dime. After perusing the web and, in particular, incorporating some of Grace Young's methods from her cookbook The Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen, I came up with this fail-proof way of poaching chicken breasts (cook them low and slow then shock them in an ice water bath to stop the cooking) that renders them super moist and tender. The ginger scallion oil is, in itself, simply divine and reminds me of the sauce that's traditionally served over Cantonese-style steamed fish.