Hainanese Chicken Rice

A poached chicken and a plate of rice cooked in its fat and its broth, so the rice carries the whole dish.

Chicken. Not vegetarian — contains chicken.

Ingredients

For the chicken

• 1 whole chicken, about 1.6 kg
• 40 g ginger, sliced
• 4 spring onions
• 2 tablespoons salt
• water to cover
• a large bowl of iced water

For the rice

• 400 g jasmine rice
• 3 tablespoons chicken fat, rendered from the cavity
• 4 cloves garlic, minced
• 20 g ginger, minced
• 2 pandan leaves, knotted
• 600 ml of the poaching broth
• 1 teaspoon salt

To serve

• 1 cucumber, sliced
• light soy sauce
• sesame oil
• red chillies and garlic pounded with lime juice

Method

1. THE RICE IS FRIED IN THE CHICKEN FAT and then cooked in the broth, and that is the dish. Plain rice beside a poached chicken is a poached chicken. Pull the pads of fat from inside the cavity before anything else and render them slowly in a dry pan; they give about three tablespoons.
2. THE WATER MUST NEVER BOIL ONCE THE BIRD IS IN. A boil tears the skin and squeezes the meat tight. A bare shiver is the whole technique, and if the surface breaks, pull the pan half off the heat.
3. The chicken rubbed inside and out with the salt, rinsed, and the cavity stuffed with ginger and spring onion.
4. Lowered breast down into a pot just big enough, covered with cold water by 3 cm, and brought up slowly to about 85C -- a few bubbles at the base of the pan and no more.
5. Held there 35 minutes for a 1.6 kg bird, then off the heat with the lid on for 15 minutes more in the hot water.
6. STRAIGHT INTO ICED WATER, fully under, 10 minutes. The shock sets the skin and gives the slight jelly beneath it that the dish is eaten for. Skip it and the skin is flabby, with nothing else going wrong to tell you why.
7. The poaching broth skimmed and kept: it is the cooking liquid for the rice and the soup served alongside.
8. Rice washed until the water runs almost clear, then drained thoroughly. Wet rice will not fry.
9. Chicken fat in a pan, garlic and ginger 1 minute until fragrant but not coloured. Rice in and stirred 3 minutes until every grain is coated and going translucent at the edges.
10. Into a rice cooker or heavy pan with the 600 ml of broth, the pandan and the salt. Cooked as any rice, and rested 10 minutes off the heat before the lid comes off.
11. The chicken chopped through the bone into pieces, laid skin up with the cucumber beside it.
12. Served with the rice, a bowl of the hot broth and the three dips separately. Nothing is dressed in advance.

Our own recipe. This one was written for this site rather than taken from anywhere, so there is no source to point you at. The quantities and the order of the steps are choices, not the only way to do it.

Filed under China · All recipes