Bamboo chicken, a popular tribal recipe in Maredumilli Agency in East Godavari District, is the most-sought-after dish now-a-days even in multi-cuisine restaurants in Hyderabad and Bangalore.
“This place came into the limelight only because of bamboo chicken and the beautiful streams nearby. Between 2012 and 2014, the number of tourists had come down drastically, thanks to agitation over bifurcation,” says senior advocate and local tribal rights activist Mokkapati Prakash.
The special variety of bamboo chicken is prepared by stuffing marinated chicken pieces into bamboo stems. The stems are then placed on coal fire, allowing chicken to set in. No oil is used in the preparation of the dish. The process is chicken gets cooked with the moisture inside the bamboo. There are also varieties such as bamboo shoot curry and bamboo chutney. The ‘bamboo chicken' has become a huge hit with the visitors and even foreign tourists are savouring it.
“From last one year, the prices of chicken have shot up and now a kilo of chicken is selling for more than Rs.350. We are charging Rs.70 per plate and per kilo chicken we can serve six plates”-said Ramu alias Ramareddy, a popular tribal youth in making bamboo chicken from last 15 years. His father Satyanarayana gets bamboo from near by forest once in fortnight or a month and wife Rani cooks the chicken along with Ramu.
Most of the youth from JNTU-Kakinada, Aditya Group of Engineering Colleges from Surampalem, Medicos from KIMS-Amalapuram, Vishnu Colleges-Bheemavaram and Eluru, Narasapuram and even from S.V. University, Anantapur, Kurnool make a point in visiting Maredumilli only for Bamboo Chicken.
Naresh and 19 of his friends made an order last Saturday and landed up at Ramu’s Kitchen on Sunday afternoon after site-seeing. “We have ordered 20 plates of Bamboo Chicken, but there are three vegetarians, when we told Ramu about them we prepared a vegetarian dish with bamboo and capsicum masala”-said Kiranchandra from the batch.
Now it is all set to get huge market within the country with two multi-national companies making efforts to further popularize this tribal recipe. Recently, one of the leading multi-national company representatives visited Maredumilli forest and stayed in Eco-Tourism Guest House for two days and gathered all the information along with video clippings of processing ‘Bamboo Chicken' and ‘Aloo dhum'.
John Fredrick, who worked General Manager in Taj Vivanta as food and beverages in Goa some time ago, along with his friends decided to launch a chain of traditional food centres all over the country with the support of some NRIs. For this, they selected ‘bamboo non-veg', ‘bamboo-veg' items. Some of the franchisees of KFC Foods, Bangalore, have also shown interest in taking tribal boys for preparing ‘Bamboo chicken' in KFC restaurants.
