Does after spending the whole day in the office and working overtime for a week, make you feel exhausted and hungry, and now you are craving late-night chicken rice? Well, if your answer is yes, then you are probably searching for the step by step on how to make the best and delicious chicken rice, right?
So to satisfy your craving, here is a recipe of the famous hainanese chicken rice you can try cooking in your home in Singapore.
Hainanese Chicken Rice Recipe
Don’t be in such a hurry, because before you can get started cooking, you must buy and complete the following ingredients:
Buy a whole organic chicken
Number of cup of Rice (Preferably plain rice)
Get a bottle of chili dipping sauce and a ginger garlic sauce
Ginger
Garlic
Rice
Green Onions
Water
Kosher Salt (Don’t use regular salt, because they are too fine and wouldn’t be able to exfoliate the chicken properly)
Start with the CHICKEN
Ensure there are no feathers or other nasties stuff left, but be careful of ruining the skin, because that will make the broth taste better. Once there are no feathers left, here the following procedure to make your chicken smooth, clean, and blemish-free.
Get a kosher salt from your cupboard in the kitchen
Pour small handful amount in your hands
Use it to exfoliate the chicken skin, because you have to get rid of the hidden guck and yuck that might be trapped in the chicken skin.
Continue rubbing the skin until there are no more dead skin or wrinkles left
After rubbing the chicken with kosher salt, rinse it water (running water will do)
Now check the chicken to see if everything is smoothly clean
Seasoning the CHICKEN
Remember, chicken tastes best with proper seasoning. So get your knife and slice some ginger and green onions, because you will be stuffing some of it inside and others will be in the big pot.
After stuffing the seasoning inside the chicken, grab your big pot and carefully place the chicken inside, and drop the remaining sliced ginger and green onion. Once done, fill the big pot with water to just cover by 1 inch (Use your finger to see if your measurement is right).
Take note: Some of the stuffing you place inside the chicken might fall out and float in the water, but don’t worry, nothing will change with its flavour, so ignore if it happens.
Cooking Hainanese CHICKEN
Keep in mind, chicken don’t cook themselves, so carefully place the big pot into the stove, open the heat, and wait for it to boil. Once it starts boiling, immediately turn the heat to low to keep a simmer.
Soon after, you will eventually see some while, floaty scum, and those are the chicken’s denatured protein, and you have to remove it because the chicken soup or broth will taste better without it, but be careful the pot is too hot.
Also, after taking out the chicken’s denatured protein, you must measure if your broth is on the right temperature of 170°F or 76.6667°C
Take note: Don’t try to pull the chicken legs out, because you will end up tearing the drumstick of the chicken, and worse, the hot broth might splashes back on your arms and face, and that would burn your skin. So genty take out the chicken from the big pot and don’t do anything with the broth like pouring it out down the sink, because you will be using it when you are about to cook the rice.
Chicken Soup for Cooking the RICE
For this step, before cooking the rice, you must thoroughly clean the rice until it gets less cloudy, and also, you must let the rice soak in the water for 10 minutes, drain the water out as much as possible after soaking.
Now you are ready to cook the rice. Here are the following steps.
Get another big pot
Pour a little bit of oil
Saute the garlic and ginger in a hot heat
Add the drained rice into the big pot
Fry the grain rice for a minute
Try to taste it if suits your tastebud, but if not, you can add a bit of salt
After sauteing the garlic, ginger, and rice. You can now pour the chicken broth or soup into the pot. However, the right measure should be one is to one, because you already soak the rice for 10 minutes earlier and it already absorbed some of the water.
So after pouring the chicken broth, bring the rice to boil and immediately turn the heat again to low, and tightly cover the lid for 15 minutes with no peeking. Once done, you are now ready to eat!
With these recipes, you will surely satisfy your craving, but if you don’t have time to cook, you can always order from the famous chicken rice restaurant called Boon Tong Kee as they have several branches from Sengkang to Century Square in Singapore.
