Hainanese Chicken Rice
Eat your cucumbers and eat your tomatoes
(Contextual fuckery: I forgot to include the broth in the final shot)
I rarely find myself cooking meals to spec. I believe dinner should be about what's in season, what's affordable or what is on special that you can plunder without grievance from any market on your way home from work. Having an explicit vision of your dinner and then going out and buying every ingredient piecemeal is not only expensive and a pain in the ass but it also doesn’t sharpen your skills as a cook.
Hainanese chicken is one of the clear exceptions to the rule, every aspect of this dish is a symphony and is worth the explicit yet basic ingredient list. Its so simple that you should have most of the ingredients regardless, or enough to make some version of it.
The most revelatory experience I’ve had with chicken rice was a decade or so ago travelling through Malacca. There is a reappropriated Pagoda in the center of that city that lures both locals and others from all over the country. The city is famous for chicken rice balls, but the inside baseball is that the real torchbearer of the town is the traditional Singaporean chicken rice dish akin to Hainanese chicken that can be found in this restaurant.
jonker st, Malacca
The experience was incredibly special, when I peeked out back I saw they were using turmeric both in its native form and powdered to create that yellow hue. Turmeric not only adds colour but also an earthy, slightly bitter flavour whilst bridging flavours together and flavouring the oil/fat that settles. Using spice or salt to bridge flavours is key in cooking. For example, salt isn’t a flavour that you necessarily want in a dish, but sodium changes the cell structure of vegetables and meats which amplifies flavour, balances bitterness and improves on the overly sweet. If you put salt on a tomato you can watch it weep which is indication of just how powerful an alchemical it is.
I started off by making a simple stock from chicken necks, turmeric, spring onion, lemongrass and star anise with some low pressure for an hour or so. I wanted the stock to be clear and not too dark so I didn’t brown the necks or vegetables beforehand. Whilst this was infusing I cut up the chicken into 8 pieces each. Scissors are the conventional shears for butchery in the Chinese kitchen. Something to do with not only tradition, but compact kitchen culture, less messiness, more precision and it grants bone-in cooking.
I wanted to poach the chicken as gently as conceivable so I used trays in an oven for 2 hours at 85 degrees. The chicken went in with the stock I just made, plus turmeric (powdered and bulbs), ginger, spring onion and star anise.
Contemporary restaurant Hainan chicken sauce from what I can tell uses acid, such as lime with MSG and salt. For this sauce I wanted to larp as a southwestern peninsular Nyonya so I pared down some garlic, lemongrass, chilli and spring onion before roughly blitzing and frying with sesame oil. I finished this with fish sauce, no different to the ground chilli sauce.
When the chicken was done I shocked the pieces in an ice bath to stop the cooking, seal in the juices and to retain a soft, springy and neutral coloured exterior. I then strained the stock once more to cook the rice in it. To ensure infallible rice texture it is probably worth using a cheesecloth to strain the stock. I don’t have one of those and besides, this way of cooking rice always grants extra crispy and discoloured clusters.
The primary saltiness of this dish comes from light soy, dark soy, oyster sauce, sesame oil and sugar combined only till it reaches a boil and then spooned over gently steamed bean sprouts.
Always finish with fresh cucumber and tomato. It's not a garnish, it's an imperative texture and freshness. Like T Bone Walker to the hollowbody… Margaret Hamilton to the Apollo program… Polgár to the fide pool….. Eat your cucumbers and eat your tomatoes.
