Visual feast

Yang Yan, the executive director, recalls that it was a hot summer when they were shooting the episode on Hetian chicken.

"We visited many chicken farmers and were a bit jealous of the chickens," Yang says, adding that the air is cleaner in the mountain area.

In 1964, Hetian chicken ranked second at the Canton Fair, or the China Import and Export Fair, where international buyers evaluated chickens based on body size, strength, weight, feather color and meat quality.

Yang says it was not easy to record the chickens' movements while shooting the documentary, as they ran too fast for the camera to catch up. "We decided to stay at one fixed point and wait for them to come into our recording range."

To grab the scenes of the chickens' jumping onto trees, the crew waited several nights.

Liu Xin, one of the three chefs in the first episode, says he was impressed by the quality of Hetian chicken and touched by the story of a woman who raises the chickens. He created a dish combining Hetian chicken with mushrooms from Yunnan province. Liu, founder of Hong 0871 Yunnan cuisine restaurant in Beijing and Shanghai, has brought this dish back and added it onto his restaurant menu. He says, "If you want to continuously create new dishes, you have to keep finding new ingredients.

"The relationship between chefs and ingredients is like that of water and fish."

After watching the first episode, Zhu Yannan, director of China Communication Research Center, says the story structure of each episode is interesting, as there is a reversal in the middle and people will enjoy watching it.

"Besides showcasing ingredients, this documentary also presents the relationship between parents and their children," he says.

"Watching the documentary not only brings us a visual feast of delicious food but also nourishes our spirit.