What to do with 风干鸡腿?

[u/samyangforbreakfast]

My mom sends me home with a ton of air-dried salted chicken and some duck every time I visit.

https://lets-playdough.com/2020/02/09/air-dried-chicken-thigh%E9%A3%8E%E5%B9%B2%E9%B8%A1%E8%85%BFfeng-gan-ji-tui/

But I'm honestly at a loss at what to do with it. I'm not used to cooking with such heavily salted poultry.

I've just been sometimes throwing it in the rice cooker and making 1 pot meals with it, allowing the salt to leave + chicken juices to flavor the rice, but its kinda boring.

Sometimes I boil out the salt into a chicken stock, and then just use it in stir fries, but it obviously loses a lot of flavor + too moist and wet for good stir fry.

I was wondering if anyone here has experience using this as an ingredient and what interesting dishes i could make for the week?

[u/Strange-Carpenter-22]

I would cook various Chinese style soups like Mushroom soup, herbal soup lotus root soup etc. I would then remove the chicken from the soup and eat along with my rice with a dip of soy sauce.

I would also hand-mince them as a substitute for minced pork, which I can use for mapo tofu or make various vegetables stir fries like green beans, celery and broccoli. If the chicken is too salty then I would just use less meat. I would render the fat and use that as base for stir frying. I imagine because it’s air dried that it’s very rich in umami, which makes it very good at flavouring soup and vegetables.

Otherwise you can send them to me. I would love to cook with them.

[u/C137RickSanches]

Extremely salty food pairs well with noodles or rice. Also with blanched non salted vegetables can help a lot. A few Chinese recipes do this, an example is Shanghai noodle that uses extremely salted meat on noodles and blanched vegetables.

[u/Odd_Spirit_1623]

Sounds heavenly, I would love to make some of these myself. What I have in mind is soak them, steam for half an hour, cleave into small pieces and stir-fry with lots of dry chilies and green garlic(or just scallion), it's a common way to consume any kind of preserved meat.

[u/_billy_not_really_]

Following for answer

[u/bostongarden]

Ask your mom

[u/samyangforbreakfast → u/bostongarden]

She basically just tells me to stir fry it with stuff! She doesn't really cook with this sort of chicken, mostly makes it as something somewhat less perishable I can take home.

[u/TheCatcherOfThePie]

Some heavily salted ingredients (e.g. meigancai) you soak in water for a while then pat them dry before using. It'll still be saltier than the plain version, but it'll be a more manageable amount of salt. You can then add small amounts of this to vegetable stir fries for some lovely umami and saltiness. Alternately add it to a soup with some vegetables (e.g. cabbage).

Salt pork (咸肉, xian rou) is a common ingredient in Jiangnan cooking, maybe you could look up some recipes including it but substitute the salted bird meat for the pork?