Hainanese Chicken Rice

This is a very simple dish to cook, but a difficult one to master. Hmm. Actually many dishes are like that. Nevermind. If you can, slaughter a chicken fresh because the essence of chicken-ness itself is the thing that makes this dish so flavorful.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a live chicken; neither do I have Kampong Chicken or top-grade fresh organic chicken. Worse, I don’t even have a fresh chicken! I just have the frozen spring chickens I bought at a big discount of 3 for $8.45. Now I need to clear them!

Brazilian Halal chicken. How cool is that!

This is another thing I love about Singapore. We have lots of exotic and yummy produce introduced by the different races from all over the world. We’re such a homogeneous mix that all the cooking from different cultures are all blended into new mongrel breeds that become the new pedigree. Like:

Apart from food fusion, we also have other surprising yet common ‘fusions’ like chinese temples/ churches/ mosques side by side…

..and chinese funerals and malay weddings held under the same void deck, usually at different timings, of course. (It’s inappropriate to post a wedding or funeral picture here. This is just to illustrate my point that void decks are kind of a communal nexus.)

Sorry, back to my Hainanese Chicken Rice.

Ingredients
Good quality chicken
Ice cubes
Cold water

Seasoning Sauce
1 tbsp oyster Sauce
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tsp concentrated chicken stock
1 tsp sesame oil
1 tbsp fried shallots with oil
1 tsp sugar
3 tbsp chicken broth (from boiling the chicken)

Chicken Rice Ingredients
Rice
Fried garlic
Fried shallot
Blended ginger
Chicken Stock
Pandan leaves (optional)

1) Bring the cleaned chicken to a brisk boil. Brisk-boil it for 2-3minutes.

2) turn off the fire and let the chicken cook in it’s own heat for 25min.

3) Remove boiled chicken and plunge it into an ice bath.

4) chop into pieces and drizzle seasoning sauce over the chicken. Ready to serve!

As you can see, I’ve laid out one serving of deboned breastmeat for B and one serving of the leg of chicken for me (told you it’s great to have a spouse who likes the stuff you dislike and dislikes the stuff you like;))

Oh, what about the Chicken Rice, you may ask? If I need to prepare dinner fast, which is most often the case, I just use instant mix