Lushan Style Braised Stone Frog

( foreignercn.com, kaleidoscope.cultural-china.com )

Updated: 2011-09-07

Lushan Style Braised Frog (lú shān shí jī 庐山石鸡) (photo from lushantrip.com)

From the Chinese name, you might get the wrong impression that the dish uses a type of home-grown chicken. However, it is not chicken but a reddish frog that lives inside caves or beneath the rocks in Lushan Mountain.

Stone frog ,also called red frog, grows in the overcast ravine and rocks and wall caves in Lushan Mountain. Its body is reddish brown. The forelimb is little and the hind leg is strong. Some people like to call it "stone chicken" , because its meat is tender, luxuriant as chicken.

Stone frogs hide in the rock caves in the daytime and look for food at night. Its shape is similar to that of the ordinary frogs but bigger and having more flesh. General weight is three or four liang (Chinese traditional unit of measure) , some weigh 0.5 kilogram.

Lushan Mountain stone frog is easy to digest, nutritious, so the cooked food taking it as raw materials can be found in every restaurant in Lushan Mountain. Among them, " braised stone frog with sauce" is one of the most famous dishes on Lushan Mountain.