-- Watch on SBS Food (Ch. 33) Mondays, 7:30pm. Stream all episodes anytime at. For recipes and more head to the . ---
Stream free On Demand
The Streets Hong Kong
series • cooking
G
series • cooking
G
A glass UFO-like dome emits a violent whir from the corner of Mama’s (grandmother’s) kitchen counter. The sound bounces off the white-tiled splashback and echoes through the brown-brick walls of the dining room. The sweet, roast-like smell draws me away from Donkey Kong annihilating a pixelated Mario on television. It tears my cousins and me out of the five-hour Nintendo stupor we’ve been engrossed in all morning.
Such is the power of soy sauce chicken wings and their addictive smell.
A click. The whirring stops. Mama’s faded floral oven mitts look bright against the light-brown tinge of the chicken wings. We scramble to take a wing each, their sticky exterior burning the roof of our mouths.
Their glistening skin always came with a side of mouth-smacking compliments.
These wings and their slightly sweet chewiness have been a staple at our family dinners, BBQs and pot-lucks for years. Their glistening skin always came with a side of mouth-smacking compliments. The soy sauce flavour baked into the skin meant that these handles of deliciousness kept their flavour - no matter how long the drive.
Soy sauce chicken, my Mama’s “go-to” dish whenever asked to “bring a plate”, is an echo of the rich tradition of Soy Sauce Western Cuisine.
Soy Sauce Western Cuisine is a Hong Kong culinary feat. When the British occupied Hong Kong, Western cuisine was quickly tackled by entrepreneurial Hong Kong locals who adapted this cuisine to local tastes, transforming an expensive, inaccessible cuisine into an affordable and convenient community staple. It has bloomed into its own cuisine where spices are added to chicken, steaks are bathed in sauce and the heat of both wok and oven dance in harmony.
Tai Ping Koon is one of the great titans of Soy Sauce Western Cuisine. in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, its branch in Hong Kong quickly became the pioneer of Hong Kong’s Soy Sauce Western Cuisine.
Credit: Adrian Patra
Get the recipe
Mum’s lemonade chicken wings
Tai Ping Koon’s most famous dish is “Swiss Chicken Wings”. Its joyful origin story still rings through more than 100 years later. You can hear it in Andrew Chui’s (the great-great-grandson of Tai Ping Koon’s founder) laughter as he explains to Dan Hong on The Streets, Hong Kong:
“Early last century, when a foreign customer came to our restaurant to taste the chicken wings. By that time, it's not called Swiss chicken wings. It's called soy sauce chicken wings. He said, "This sauce is great. It tastes sweet." But our employees are not familiar about English, and it sounds like Swiss to them.
So, my Great-great-grandfather, "Great. Why don't we just name the soy sauce chicken wings to the Swiss chicken wings?"
The delightful name rings from the myth straight to the dish. The light brown-reddish hue of the wings floating in a moat of soy sauce glistens in the yellow lighting of Tai Ping Koon. It’s all thanks to the aromatics of onion, ginger, carrots, bay leaf and peppercorn meeting the vibrancy of Shaoxing wine, rock sugar and not one, but three types of soy sauce.
Swiss chicken wings are merely one drop in the vast ocean of delights of Soy Sauce Western Cuisine. Alongside it, you’ll find roasted pigeon, souffles as big as your head and creamy baked rice (think gratin meets fried rice). Something is mesmerising seeing a dark sauce, almost as dark as traditional beef gravy, dripping across blushing cuts of steak, sliced across a bed of noodles.
Truly, the best of both worlds.
The influence of Soy Sauce Western Cuisine has stretched beyond Hong Kong’s harbours, to the ports of South-East Asia, and the trickles of the East-Asian diaspora who eventually made Australia (and the West) their home. In an age where air-fryers have a cult following and chicken wings form their own food group, you’ll find soy sauce honey chicken wings, soy sauce sesame wings and sticky soy sauce and gochujang wings in your favourite restaurant or online recipe catalogue.
Of course, you’ll still find it in kitchens on the outskirts of Australia’s suburbia. And while my mama’s soy sauce chicken may pale against the grandeur of its forebears in Guangdong and Hong Kong, it still shares the humble comfort that Soy Sauce Chinese Cuisine brought to local communities over a century ago.
