Singapore

Menu: Hainanese Chicken Rice | Recipe Sources: AngSarap and SeriousEats

This dinner felt like a hug. It was one of the healthiest Cooking Around the World meals to date, and also the meal with the least waste. The liquid used to poach the chicken is reserved, boiled down into a broth (with a little flavorful help from green onions, ginger, and cilantro stems), and then used to cook absolutely everything else on the plate. The gingery rice gets steamed in it; it takes the eye-watering edge off of the chili sauce; and it adds some extra dimensionality to the sweet soy and lime sauce.

Thoughts: Of all the national dishes that I’ve tackled so far, Hainanese Chicken had the most conflicting recipes/cooking instructions when I researched it online. On one hand, I absolutely love that type of chaos because it implies (I think) that Singaporean families and restaurants all have slightly different ways of cooking this meal, and the “right” mix of ingredients and methods for Hainanese Chicken is very much up for interpretation. On the other hand, it was pretty difficult for someone new to the dish (me!) to figure out which recipe, which ingredient list, and which set of cooking instructions would yield the best results. In the end, I landed somewhere in the middle of the two recipes that I linked up above. The ingredient list from AngSarap felt like the better collision of flavors and, at least in terms of the serving sauces and the recommendation to serve a bowl of broth, more authentic; but the chicken-poaching and broth-making instructions from SeriousEats made the most sense to me. In the end, the broth was beautiful, the chicken was juicy, the rice was fragrant… but the sauces were the absolute stars of the show.

Ready to Cook?

Chicken: I added chopped up cilantro and lime juice to the rest of the ingredients listed on the AngSarap recipe under “Whole Chicken”. I followed the cooking instructions on SeriousEats.

Chicken Broth: I added green onions, two inches of peeled ginger, and cilantro stems to the broth while it reduced (and otherwise followed the AngSarap ingredients under “Broth”). I also added a little light soy sauce to it.

Rice: I cooked down the trimmed fat from the whole chicken (removed prior to poaching) on the lowest possible heat, stirring occasionally; it probably took 40 minutes in total, but it was worth it. I cooked the grated ginger, garlic and cilantro stems in the rendered fat, then added it to the rice.

Soy Sauce: I tried to split the middle on the two recipes and instead landed somewhere entirely different (but somewhat close-ish to other recipes I found?? None of them agree on what the authentic recipes for the side sauces are!). I did 1/4 cup light soy sauce, the juice from 1.5 limes, a hefty amount of ginger, a little salt, and 3 tbsp of the chicken broth. After using my immersion blender on it, I poured it through a fine mesh strainer to pull out any ginger chunkies.

Chili Sauce: I also went slightly rogue on this one (since there is literally no consensus anywhere online!) and did 1.5 tbsp fish sauce, 12 red Thai chilis, 4 garlic cloves, 1 tbsp grated palm sugar, a pinch of salt, and chicken broth.