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
