Holiday Ayo - Pop chicken is one of the most popular dishes from a typical Minang restaurant. Chicken with perfectly absorbed spices is a favorite choice of many people.

After being seasoned, the pop chicken is boiled with coconut water and chopped garlic. After that, the chicken is fried in hot oil so that it is perfectly cooked and creates a crunchy texture. This method causes the pop chicken to be white.

Sambal served with chicken pop is made from finely ground chilies, tomatoes and shallots and then cooked with a taste that is not too spicy but slightly sour. This dish will taste delicious when consumed with hot rice.

Quoting from the stekom.ac.id page, actually the origin of pop chicken is not known for certain. However, some sources say that this dish comes from one of the restaurants in Bukittinggi, namely the Benteng Indah Family Restaurant which has been established since 1963.

At first this restaurant only sold ordinary dry fried chicken. One day when orders started to get a lot, the owner of the restaurant boiled a large amount of chicken in coconut milk and minced garlic and then fried it briefly so that customers wouldn't have to wait long.

Intentionally or not, this chicken dish has become popular because it looks different from fried chicken in general and has a distinctive aroma of coconut water and a more savory taste.

This dish later became a favorite food for Chinese residents in Bukittinggi at that time because the pale white pop chicken looks similar to Hainanese chicken, which is a typical Chinese boiled chicken dish.

It was named chicken pop because at that time, the restaurant often held musical performances and the popular music genre at that time was pop music, so the name chicken pop is used until now.

There are also sources that say that chicken pop became popular in 1976. One of the popular restaurants from West Sumatra, namely Simpang Raya, was the first to popularize this name by calling their fried chicken dish as chicken pop, so several Simpang Raya branches added the slogan "Istana Ayam Pop" and patented became one of the main dishes at the restaurant.