Southwest 5 to 7, occasionally gale 8.
Rough or very rough, becoming moderate or rough.
Showers.
Good, occasionally moderate.
Today`s dish is one of the recipes I wish
I hadn’t agreed to write. First of all it is generally a quite time consuming
dish, second I am not that fond of chicken and thirdly, it seemed nearly
impossible to make for one. But I can be quite stubborn and after my failed
third attempt with the broth I was so furious that I wanted to crack it. And if
it means eating chicken for a year. Fortunately I cracked it around the sixth
try.
So why is it so tricky to make at home
(unless you follow my recipe)? Most recipes start with “Poach a chicken in
chicken stock”. That`s right, you need to make a chicken stock first. The ones
who don’t start with that sentence ask you do poach 3 chicken in water and use
the resulting stock. A bit much for one person. But it does not end here. A
typical example for poaching that bird would be: “Heat the stock and add the
halved chicken. ...Turn the heat immediately to zero and poach that chicken in
the warm water for 20 minutes. Take the chicken out, reboil the stock, add
chicken and repeat. Repeat that step 3 more times”.
Crickey..life is too short
to do that. Especially if you want a chicken (soup) for the soul because life
is unfair and you are down with a cold.
So I started to experiment with shop
bought chicken stock.
Dont do it. Never ever. While it is not
exactly vile tasting, it will not result in a Hainanese Chicken Rice. Plus most
shop bought chicken stocks contain palm oil.
So I am afraid you have to make your own
stock. From a whole chicken, or some 2 kilos of cheap chicken wings; but I
would advise against the latter. You see, the dish has very few ingredients
(apart from the sauces) and you really need to rely on good quality. While you
cant use the cooked chicken (from my stock method) for the Hainanese Chicken
Rice, it is still good enough for sandwiches or in another soupy dish.
And yes, you will end up with far too much
stock for one. But nothing stops you to freeze the leftover stock, either in
portions for another dish, or in these plastic ice cube bags so you always have
one cube as your “chicken stock cube”.
Now.. what is Hainanese Chicken Rice. I
had my first in Malaysia and nearly did not order it. The translation was
“plain boiled cold chicken with rice and spicy sauces”.
Hrmph. Cant say that plain boiled chicken
is on top of my list of scrumptious foods. And cold. And probably chewy like
cardboard.
I am glad that I ordered it. It is a
mindboggling combination of silky, tender, cold (room temperature) chicken, hot
fatty rice which has been cooked in the stock and a small cup of a chicken
stock which can only be described as the mother of all chicken essence. On top
of it you get often at least two spicy sauces to dip your chicken in, often
made with the chicken stock too. It is not about the chicken. The dish is
called chicken rice. In fact, if pressed, I would give you the chicken and just
eat the rice with the soup and the condiments.
Now, how to get a perfect chicken soup
and silky chicken without too much faff? The answer is a slow cooker.
A few years ago a slow cooker became
fashionable for a short time and since then the hype has died in the UK. I
never understood this. I always use my slow cooker; in fact I have two sizes.
If you don’t have an oven, get a slow cooker. If you work out of the house and
want to come home to the smell of food but don’t want the danger of an oven,
get a slow cooker.
If you are ill and all you want to do is
sleep, you hopefully have a slow cooker.
The cheapest at Argos is £10 (1.5
litre, good for one person, the big one £15). Aldi and Lidl have them sometimes
for £8.
Dont buy one with all the whistles, you
don’t need that.
If you like the idea of a timer function
(so it starts at 3 pm just in time for your coming home at 7pm) buy for a few
pounds a timer to go onto your circuit. No need to get a slow cooker with that
feature for £60.
While a slow cooker is perfect for all
kinds of cheaper cuts of meat, it is also perfect for poaching.
A chicken in a slow cooker with water, on
low, will give you after 3 hours tender chicken and a good broth. After 5 hours
the chicken meat is a bit “tired”, but still good enough for sandwiches, and an
insane good broth. If you don’t mind the chicken but are after the best broth
ever, chuck everything in the slow cooker, go to sleep and wake up 8 hours to
the smell of a broth which is probably the best you ever had.
And once you have the broth (and a slow
cooker), the Hainanese Chicken Rice is a breeze.
Hainanese Chicken Rice with a chilli ginger dip
Part 1: The broth (can be made at the beginning of the cold
season and frozen in portions when you need it)
1 chicken (at least free range, better
corn fed free range, even better organic, ultimate is a organic soup chicken
from a farmers market= a soup chicken is an old chicken, too tough to eat as a
roast chicken but perfect for broth due to the muscular flesh. If you can get
it, it is also cheap as chips)
1 tsp salt
1 bunch of spring onions (white only)
10 cm of fresh ginger, no need to peel,
just cut it in small slices
3 garlic cloves, no need to peel
1.5 litre of water.
Take the fat out of the chicken and keep
it. If you continue to cook later just put it in the fridge, if not, freeze it.
Cut the chicken up as small or as big as you want it, put into the slow cooker.
Add salt, ginger, garlic, spring onions and water and put slow cooker on low.
Go back to sleep and wake up a few hours
later rested. Or go to work. Or read a book. You are aiming for at least 4
hours doing nothing in the kitchen. The longer, the better.
Drain, either throw the content of the
sieve away or take bits out and use for something else. Freeze the broth if
desired.
Part 2: the chicken
2 chicken thighs
5 cm of ginger (no need to peel but cut
into slices)
Enough chicken broth to fully cover the
thighs in your slow cooker.
Heat broth in the slow cooker on high.
Once it is hot, turn to low. In the meantime loosen the skin from the flesh
without ripping it off completely and push the ginger slices under the skin.
Add to the cooling broth for one hour. Either go back to bed during that hour
to nurture your cold or pretend you work (aka during “ research on the
internet” when in fact you either look at cute cat videos or get stuck in the
sidebar of shame of the Daily Mail). And if you want to feel smug for being
organized, put your rice (next step) into cold water for one hour). Take the thighs out of the slow cooker, cover
with a bit of broth and let cool down to room temperature. Let the stock bubble
away.
Step 3: Time for some 10 minute action. The rice.
The chicken fat
1 sprinkle of salt
2/3 cup of jasmine rice
2x 3/4/ cups of the chicken stock (in
short, double the amount of stock to rice but a bit less= do double and take
maybe 2 tbsp of stock out again.)
The greens from the spring greens,
chopped in small slices (optional)
Or/and, if you can get hold of these:
2 pandang leaves (but this is really
optional. Dont sweat if you cant get them).
Soak the rice for one hour in cold water
(see above). Drain and wash. Add the chicken fat to a pot on low and let melt,
at least halfway, so you have at least 1 tbsp of chicken fat.
Add the drained rice, the salt and stir.
Every grain should be glistening with fat. Add the stock, let boil and once it
boils, turn down as low at it gets. From that moment DO NOT stir the rice. If
you have pandang leaves add them now. Cover the pot with a lid and put the
timer on 10 minutes. DONT stir, don’t touch.
Your stock in the slow cooker should
still bubble away.
While you wait for the rice to finish do
the sauce(s) and the condiments. Once the rice is nearly done, add the slices
of spring onion and give it another 2 minutes. The rice should be soft but not
too mushy. Once done, fish the pandang leaves and the left over from the
chicken fat out and put onto a plate.
Step 4: The sauce(s) and side dishes
Apart from the cucumbers the rest is optional. You could either
make it dead easy and just mix dark soya sauce with a bit of chicken stock; you
could get a jar of chopped chillies, take a spoon out, add a bit of lime juice
and a bit of chicken stock and sesame oil. You could do both and also a third
sauce. You can buy a sauce. Or you could do the following:
1 few slivers of ginger
Slivers of one garlic clove
Slivers of at least one birds eye chilli
1 bit of rock sugar (or kandis)
Half the juice of a lime or lemon
1 tbsp of neutral oil
If you wish to do so, add a few drops of
fish sauce (I always wish to do so)
Mix. Or pound all in a pestle and mortar
and thus mix.
Half a cucumber, peeled and cut into
slices.
To serve
The hot fatty glistening rice
The coldish chicken
The sliced cucumber
One sauce or as many as you wish
A cup of the chicken broth from the slow
cooker which had the extra benefit of more chicken and is now reduced to a
golden broth of insane intensity.
To eat:
Dip the chicken first into the hot soup
and then into your dipping sauce(s).
Eat the rice.
In between clean your palate with the
simple cucumber.
Have a sip of soup.
Repeat.
Or you could be a glutton like me and
first eat that rice. Then drink the soup. And end with the chicken dipped in
sauce.
No one judges you if you drink the soup
first.
Verdict:
Okay, if you have come so far you might
be exhausted from reading it. It sounds like a job for a professional kitchen.
And it is. But if you count the time you actually worked, it will be less than
30 minutes. If you do the broth in advance and the chicken in advance (but take
both, plus the chicken fat, out of the freezer in the morning), you will work a
total of 10 minutes to get dinner.
And do yourself a favour and never take
the fat from the broth. It is important to get the rice right and keep the
chicken juicy.
Despite me mentioning several times fat,
it is actually a low calorie dish. There is no extra fat. Just the fat from a
chicken.
As to the photo. It is not mine. I really
need a new camera.
It is from a website from someone who
seems to be obsessed with Hainanese Chicken Rice and is posting pictures of
that dish wherever he finds them. I really did try to get the name of the
photographer but no chance. If it is yours and you wish me to remove it,
contact me and I am happy to oblige.
And if you want to such a perfect looking
chicken, put it into an ice bath (bowl with ice cubes and water) just after you
took it out from the broth.
No comments:
Post a Comment