VOLUME 3, AUG 2006
## Bon Appetit Hainanese Chicken Rice by Shawn Lee In both Hainan and Singapore, chicken rice always comes with three dips. There is the common chilli sauce and ground ginger, but while we have thick dark soya sauce as a third choice, it is an oyster sauce-garlic mix in Hainan. India and Malay influences have also made our chilli dips hotter, and while the Hainanese sauce is watered down with white vinegar, we prefer the fruity sourness of local limes (sambal belacan style). The differences may seem small, but most of us will swear that we cannot have chicken rice without the shiok chilli. As late as the mid-60s, there was a clear distinction between Hainanese chicken rice and Cantonese pak cham kai (translated as "white-cut chicken"). The Hainanese would robustly boil big, fat hens to render lots of oil to make rice fragrant. The Cantonese insisted on tender-fleshed younger birds cooked red-at-the-bone, melt-in-the-mouth, even though these chickens never had enough fat in them to make tasty rice. So strictly speaking, chicken rice is Hainanese. The Cantonese dish was a delicacy enjoyed for its own sake. However, the two cooking styles have now “merged”. Cantonese chefs offer chicken flavoured rice with pak cham kai, and Hainanese chefs now cook younger birds to create the supple, jelly-like skin characteristic of Cantonese pak cham kai. Notwithstanding this merger of cooking styles, one difference remains to distinguish the locally cooked chicken from that prepared in Hainan. Singapore chefs boil chickens in water flavoured with garlic and ginger, then later serve up some of this broth as soup, using the remainder to cook with rice. The Hainan chef cooks the chickens in a pork and chicken bone stock, which is not served as soup or used for cooking rice, but is topped up with water as necessary and reused. Over time, this will become a rich stock (lu) that will add a distinct meatier flavour to the chickens cooked in it, and tales abound of more than hundred year-old's stock still in use. Here are some highly recommended restaurants: Tian Tian Hainanese Chicken Rice Maxwell Road Food Centre Stall 10 Lee Fun Blk 94 Toa Payoh Lorong 4 #01-04 Singapore 310094
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