Wachipa: A Rice Dish Made with Burnt Chicken Feathers
This chicken-and-rice dish from Sikkim has a unique ingredient that imparts a most unusual flavour.
Two loud beeps and Sanju Rai picks up her phone to check her messages. “Order ayo!” she exclaims in Nepali. Rai has been waiting all morning for this. “Order placed for three plates of wachipa from a nearby locality,” she says, and begins the cooking process at the kitchen in her homestay, Silvasco Kitchen, in Namchi, a small district-headquarter town in south Sikkim. The word ‘silvasco’ means a place to have fun, in Kulung-Rai bhasa, a language spoken by the Kulung Rai people. A popular tourist destination in the Himalayan state, Namchi is known for its ornate Buddhist monasteries and breathtaking views of Mt Kanchendzonga. Sanji’s home-kitchen business sells authentic Rai cuisine through a local online delivery partner.
The 48-year-old learned to cook wachipa from her father. Wachipa is a family dish, going back many generations. It is made with a combination of rice, chunks of chicken, and koko, a powder made from burnt chicken feathers. It koko that lends the dish its unique bitter flavour, and signature roasted aroma.
An Ancestral Recipe Gets Spotlight
Post-pandemic, Sanju decided to share her ancestral wachipa recipe with the world by serving the dish to guests at her homestay. “Guests wanted an authentic Sikkimese food experience, and I thought of wachipa. We served it as a snack to accompany chang, a homemade millet beer, and the positive response gave me the confidence to sell it online, which then gave me a wider customer reach,” she explains.
“Traditionally, wachipa was served both as a main dish and as an accompaniment to alcoholic drinks. Back in the day, after a tiring harvest in the fields, farmers would cook wachipa and have it with chang,” said CM Khambu, a Sikkim-based linguist.
Bumchimpa, A Vegetarian Variant
“Bumchimpa, on the other hand, is a vegetarian variation of the chicken dish, innovated only about a decade ago, skips the laborious, time-consuming process of burning the fine inner layer of chicken feathers to a powder,” Rai adds. In Bumchimpa, titheyphool, also known as Damlapa flower, is dried and powdered and used as a bitter flavouring in place of the chicken feather powder. “For koko, we don’t use the entire chicken feather. After removing the thick outer feathers, we burn the fine inner feathers of the bird over a fire, preferably a wood fire but a gas fire will also do the job. The black ash is collected and sieved to remove impurities,” she elaborates.
“One of the indigenous communities of the eastern Himalayan belt, the Rais belong to the Kirati group predominant in Nepal, Sikkim, and northern parts of West Bengal. They believe in animism and worship mountains, local rivers, and forests,” explains Khambu, who is also from the community. “‘Wa’ means chicken in our Kulung Rai language and 'chipa’ refers to burnt, fine chicken feathers.”
For centuries if not more, Wachipa was prepared during the harvest season, between October to December, where the fresh, newly harvested rice was offered to mother nature as a sign of gratitude. It was also an offering to seek blessings of good health and prosperity in the new year. “In ancient times, Kirat people who lived in the mountains, had great knowledge of the local medicinal plants and herbs. Even today, it is believed that wachipa can cure body aches and it also gives energy to the body,” he adds.
Ingredients to make bumchimpa
Bumchimpa
Sanju can cook two variants of wachipa. The traditional one is made using unpolished rice and country chicken. This version is more time consuming and the resulting dish is sticky, and similar to khichdi. The second variation, a modern restaurant-style version, uses pre-boiled rice which is fried with chicken pieces and koko.
Sanju prepares and stores a big batch of koko and damlapa powder every week. Both bumchipa and wachipa are spicy. Ginger and locally grown dalle khursani are used in the preparations to to give it that zing. And only country-chicken is used to make wachipa.
Traditional wachipa
Restaurant-style wachipa
Recipe: Traditional Wachipa
Ingredients
500 g unpolished rice
1kg country chicken cut into bite-size pieces
50g roughly crushed ginger
350g finely chopped green chilli
3tbsp mustard oil or ghee
1 tbsp ghee to garnish
2-3 tsp koko
Salt to taste
2-3 litres (or more) of hot water, enough to cook the rice to a soft texture
Method
Heat oil in a kadhai and dry fry the chicken chunks with ginger and chilli.
Add rice and fry for a few minutes.
Pour hot water and let the mixture cook without a lid.
Once the rice is well-done, add koko and mix.
Add ghee and cover before switching off the flame.
Find the recipe for bumchimpa here.
Diwash Gahatraj is an independent journalist based in Siliguri. He writes about people, health, food & culture.
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