Maritime Southeast Asia · Volume 45, The Mortar, the Wok and the Roti Board
Hainanese chicken rice
Hainanese, Singapore and Malaysia
An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.
- Time
- 30 minutes
- Reviewed
- Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Not yet cooked and reported
The clearest single proof that none of this happened in isolation is a Singapore street name: Kadayanallur Street, in the Maxwell Road area, renamed in 1952 for a Tamil Muslim community from Tirunelveli district, is today the address of Tian Tian Hainanese Chicken Rice, one of the city's most garlanded hawker stalls. A Hainanese dish sold on a Tamil Muslim street is not an irony this chapter needs to resolve. It is simply what a real creole port looks like once you stop expecting its communities to stay in separate lanes.
As tradition built it
Chicken poached about 40 minutes, iced 30 minutes; rice cooked 20 minutes, rested 20 to 30 minutes
Ingredients
- 1.7kg whole chicken, ideally free-range whole chicken, ideally free-range, approximating Hainan's Wenchang breed
- 5cm piece ginger ginger
- 4 spring onions spring onion
- 675g rice, aged three to six months rice, aged three to six months
- 4 garlic cloves garlic
- 2 to 3 pandan leaves pandan leaf
- 4 to 6 red chillies, 6 slices ginger and 6 garlic cloves, blended with lime juice and stock chilli-ginger dip
- 2 tbsp dark soy sauce dark soy sauce
Method
- A whole chicken, ideally a free-range bird approximating Hainan's own Wenchang breed, is poached gently, never boiled, for around forty minutes in water perfumed with ginger and spring onion, then plunged into iced water for thirty minutes, the shock that sets the skin to its correct silky, jellied finish.
- The rice is fried first in the chicken's own rendered fat with garlic, ginger and pandan leaf, then cooked in the poaching stock itself for twenty minutes, using rice aged three to six months for a firmer, less gluey grain, and rested a further twenty to thirty minutes before serving.
- The chicken is served at room temperature, sliced, with a chilli-ginger dip, dark soy, and the rice alongside, not underneath.
What a modern chef changes
A sous vide poach, and the rendered skin restored as a cracker
Method
- Poach the chicken sous vide at 64°C for around ninety minutes for a texture the traditional hand-timed poach can only approximate, then use the exact poaching liquid, now perfectly clarified by the low, steady temperature, to cook the rice as the tradition demands.
- Render extra chicken skin separately and dehydrate it into a shattering cracker to scatter over the sliced chicken, restoring, deliberately, the crackle a gently poached bird's skin necessarily gives up.