Singapore’s Hainanese chicken rice is considered a national dish and one of the famous dishes in Southeast Asia. The dish itself has a variety of versions that are prepared in a slightly different way. However, it started from the traditional Hainanese way of cooking chicken dishes, primarily the Wenchang chicken.
The best chicken rice in Singapore is left on subjective answers with many chicken rice restaurants with the somewhat different formulation and cooking methods. Perhaps, there’s no telling which is the best restaurant that serves. But everything remains faithful to the traditional way of cooking the dish. Moreover, it can be found anywhere from street stalls to fanciful dining places and chicken rice restaurants.
How to cook
The traditional way of cooking chicken rice always involves the importance of having a chicken broth. The main highlight of the dish is all about the pure taste of poached chicken, it’s pure savoury liquid blended with oil and topped with a wee bit of spices to add more seasoning and aroma. Add some flavourful rice to make the dish complete.
The first step is preparing the chicken to be cooked by simmering. Trim and remove the chicken and reserve it later for creating the dish’s rice. After that, proceed seasoning and exfoliating the chicken with the salt. Rub it down to make it rinse and dry. Then you can add salt, crushed or sliced ginger and the scallion or the spring onion inserted inside the cavity of the chicken which adds more flavour and taste. Afterwards, put the chicken in the pot and pour a large volume of water in it. Let it simmer for 30 minutes.
The second step now involves creating the dish sauce with chilli for tasty condiments. While you wait for the chicken to be cooked gently in the pot. You can move on with preparing your sauce. The sauces ingredients are composed of spring onion, peeled or crushed ginger, sugar, a clove of garlic, reserved chicken stock and a sriracha chilli sauce which will add a bit of spice.
After the chicken is cooked you can wait for it to be cooled. Following the process, you can heat the oil and blend the ginger and garlic nicely. You can have your formula by having different measurements of ingredients and its balance to suit your taste. That will be the ginger-garlic sauce for the dish.
The next one will be the chilli sauce which involves the rest of the other ingredients which are sugar, salt, garlic, ginger and your chilli sauce. You can add some lime liquid or vinegar and a small amount of chicken stock if you want more taste and flavour for the chilli sauce.
As mentioned before, the chicken fats will be used in the process of preparing the rice. Heat your pan to medium heat and pour down some sesame oil and then add in those reserved chicken fat. Shortly, mix the ginger and garlic. Fry them until they are perfectly cooked in light-golden brown. Avoid burning your flavourings in the process. Afterwards, you’ll have to boil the rice grain in the pot using chicken stock with those fried ingredients. Then stir gently. You can add pandan leaves in the process if you want more aroma.
That’s how the classic Hainanese chicken rice in Singapore is prepared and cooked at home.
