Hainanese chicken rice

Hainanese Chicken Rice with Red Chilli, Ginger and Soy dipping sauces

I found this recipe on SBS webpage’s whilst looking for something else, sort of stumble on it and it sounded great, only thing was I could not see a photo of it as it was not showing for some reason, so I just googled for images “Hainanese chicken rice recipe” and found a multitude of them.  On further reading of this dish, I learnt that it is pretty much made the same way by everyone that makes it and it sounds simple enough, but really it is a very long and involved process with many different elements to it, so it was good I left it to try on a quite Sunday afternoon.

Three hours after I began the cooking process, we sat down to an amazing dinner, very very tasty rice and very very tender chicken.  The chicken is poached in hot water, but water that is never brought to the boil with the chicken in it, it takes an hour for this process alone, but the result was very moist, tender and flavoursome chicken.  The stock produced from cooking of the chicken is used to start off the soup, which is in itself another hour of cooking time.

Preparing the rice in chicken fat, ginger and garlic

The rice aspect of the dish is started out by frying a lump of chicken fat and a little skin, which you then add ginger and garlic too, once the fat gives up some oil in the wok.  The fat and skin is then removed and the rice added, and cooked for a few minutes before it then makes its way to the rice cooker, or as I did a saucepan and cooked by your normal method, only you use some of the stock/soup instead of water.  The result is the yummiest rice, the rice was the highlight of the dish for me, but in saying that the chicken and the soup were pretty damn good too.

Poaching the bird

We had been out to the Swan Alley for lunch earlier in the day and had stopped at our favourite winery Windy Creek to pick up a few bottles of red, so it was only fitting that we cracked a bottle of their “Autumn Red” to go with our chicken and rice dinner.  This is the perfect drop when you have something a little spicy such as the Asian flavours we enjoyed tonight, it was nice too, a bit heavier than a Rose which is often matched with Asian foods.

Moist tender and juicy meat, yummo

I have just gone back to the SBS webpage’s to try and retrace my steps, as I want to do another Asian styled soup dish tomorrow night, which uses most of the same ingredients and methods as I have used today, the great thing is tomorrow I have ready made ingredients and it will only be a matter of heating them up, so all today’s efforts have some pay off!  The funny thing was I found the photo’s that I could not see the other day were in fact a video of a women cooking this recipe, I was gobbed smacked, as she appears to have taken some short cuts in the video, such as using ready made stock in the rice, but whatever it was great the way I did it, though after the three hours of cooking I was thinking the next time Jo wants Hainanese chicken rice, we are off to Northbridge!!!  Now what I cannot believe is I was actually able to trace my steps from last week and actually found the recipe for tomorrow night’s dinner, so I won’t have to wing it after all!

If you would like a printable copy of the recipe, just as I used, it let me know and I will email it to you, otherwise you can check it out here on SBS.