Arroz caldo

A thick chicken and rice porridge carried by ginger, with toasted garlic and calamansi on top.

Chicken. Not vegetarian — contains chicken, chicken stock, fish sauce.

Ingredients

• 250 g glutinous rice, rinsed twice
• 800 g chicken thighs, bone in
• 80 g fresh ginger
• 1 onion, finely chopped
• 6 garlic cloves, finely sliced
• 3 tablespoons fish sauce
• 1 teaspoon kasubha threads
• 2 litres chicken stock
• 4 tablespoons oil
• 4 spring onions, sliced
• 6 calamansi, halved
• 1 teaspoon black pepper

Method

1. THE GINGER GOES IN AT THE START AND IN JULIENNE -- half of it in matchsticks with the onion, half held back raw for the top. Grated, it disappears into the rice and the bowl tastes only of chicken. This is the dish where you want to meet it.
2. Fry the sliced garlic in the oil over a low heat until pale gold, then lift it out onto paper. It keeps crisping after it leaves the pan, so stop it one shade early. This is the topping, and it is not optional.
3. Onion and the first half of the ginger into the garlic oil, 4 minutes.
4. Chicken in, skin down, 4 minutes. Fish sauce over it.
5. Rice in, stirred for 1 minute so every grain is coated in fat. Kasubha in, crumbled between the fingers.
6. Stock in. Bring up, then down to a bare simmer, uncovered, 35 minutes, stirring every few minutes and scraping the bottom. Glutinous rice sticks and catches, and a caught bottom flavours the whole pot.
7. Lift the chicken out at 20 minutes, pull the meat off, return the meat and throw the bones away. Left in, the bones shed splinters into a dish people eat with a spoon.
8. It is done when a spoon dragged across the bottom leaves a line that closes slowly. Thinner than that and it is soup; thicker and it sets in the bowl.
9. Pepper in. Serve with the raw ginger, the fried garlic, spring onion and a calamansi half on every bowl.

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 Philippines · All recipes