One of the national dishes of Singapore is Hainanese chicken rice, a deceptively simple dish that's very closely associated with Singapore, but is eaten in many other Southeast Asian countries. The origin of the dish comes from immigrants from the Hainan province in China; it's in fact still made their but called something different.
It all starts with chicken. In my case that chicken was actually seitan. Traditionally, you take a whole chicken, clean it, then boil it. Luckily with seitan you don't have to do all that, so I just cut it into bit sized pieces.
Next, you add the chicken/seitan to a pot of water with garlic, ginger, and scallion. As I've said before, boiling seitan generally does not work out very well. However, it's generally okay for a few minutes, you just don't want to continue boiling it in a soup for like an hour.
The broth that results from boiling everything actually gets repurposed as the soup component of the meal. I added some cilantro and extra scallions.
Next comes the actual rice part! First, you fry up some ginger and garlic in a pot until nice and aromatic.
Then you take your white rice, which has been rinsed three times, and add it to the same pot. Stir, add a bit of sesame oil and let the rice grains toast for a minute, and then add some of that lovely broth from earlier as the cooking liquid.
While the rice steams, you have time to make a couple sauces. The first one is a chili sauce, consisting of lime juice, garlic, ginger, sugar, a little bit of the reserved broth, and usually sriracha or some other kind of pre-made chili sauce. I don't keep sriracha on hand because I'm not actually a huge fan of it--I guess it's fine but maybe the huge trend of it being on literally everything like 10 years ago made me like it less. I did, however, have sweet chili sauce, so I used that and just left out the sugar.
I think because I used that instead, my sauce came out more orange than the red it's supposed to look like. The second sauce is a ginger garlic sauce, which I don't have individual pictures of, but it's the yellow stuff at the top of the first picture. This was less of a sauce and more of a flavored oil. We weren't huge fans of it; the garlic and ginger don't really get cooked. You just heat some oil, turn off the heat, and add in the minced garlic and ginger, which fry for only a few seconds before you add some salt and vinegar. I think in general the amount of raw garlic in this dish was crazy overpowering. I'm not sure if it's my garlic or my weak tolerance but I have since avoided using raw garlic in most things.
Once everything has been prepared, it's time to put it all together. The chicken either goes on top or alongside the rice, which shares a plate with some sliced cucumbers. The recipe I used had no mention of cucumbers, but if you look up pictures of the dish, most of them include cucumbers. Some also have lettuce or bok choy or tomatoes. Maybe the goal is to have a nice palate cleanser in between bites of raw garlic. The sauces can either be served right on top of the chicken or on the side.
I can definitely see this being served in a cafeteria or food court, or even as street food. I can imagine eating this out of a styrofoam takeout container. There's multiple components to the dish, but each are prepared very simply, but with lots of flavor still. And it's a nice complete meal! You get veggies, protein, rice, and a nice little soup to drink at the end. I also really enjoy how you basically use everything, there's not a lot of waste to this dish, which is nice.
Recipes Used: Hainanese Chicken Rice
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