Hainan Chicken Rice | One of Our All-Time Most Popular Recipes! | The Woks of Life

Hi everybody, this is an exciting day because we're going to make Judy's Hainan chicken and it's delicious. Hainan chicken, for those of you who don't know, it's a very famous recipe that's very common in Singapore. I'm not going to lie, it's a project, but if you're organized, we're going to show you how actually to make it somewhat easier. Three main components in Hainan chicken. It's the chicken, which is poached to perfection. There's the sauces and the rice. So there's three different sauces in Hainan chicken. It's the sweet dark soy sauce, the ginger garlic sauce, and the chili sauce. And here's how you eat it actually, right? So you get the rice after the chicken is cooked and cooled slightly, so it's warm. You cut the chicken, you put that on top, and then you mix and match the sauces. You put a little bit of ginger garlic sauce, put a little bit of chili sauce, and then sweet dark soy sauce, and it's kind of up to you. You could eat it with the chicken, you can mix a little bit with the rice, but you'll know when you get it all in front of you. And then you're going to try each sauce and try the chicken, and then you're just going to develop your own taste on what you want to go with what. All right, so the high level steps of this is that we're going to poach the chicken, you know, let it cool, give it an ice bath, and then we're going to cook the rice, make the sauces, and then assemble the dish, okay? So all these steps sort of go in, we're going to try to overlap. Like for example, while we're letting the water boil and the chicken is poaching, we can work on the sauces and work on the ingredients for the rice. And when the chicken is sort of cooling after it's done, we can cook the rice, the sauces will be done, and then we're going to be ready to cut the chicken and assemble everything together. So that's the way it's going to go. So let's get to it. Okay, so we've got, we call for two scallions in here, but this is, these are giant scallions, so this is probably okay. A little more, a little less scallion is not going to matter, but what I'm doing here is I'm smashing it so that they'll release the aromatics. Probably this is enough, okay? We're going to put this here, and we've got the ginger, four or five slices of ginger, and also you want to sort of smash these open so they release the flavor. Four or five pieces is fine. Set this over here with, together, we're just going to pour all this in the water, okay? And that's the chicken. We're going to portion out the ingredients for the ginger garlic sauce, which requires, and we're going to use our trusty scale here, it's roughly a four inch piece of ginger, roughly 48 grams. So these kitchen scales are invaluable. They're definitely your friend. So how about if we use one of these big ones? 44, a little bit extra because we're going to take the skin off, that should be fine. Okay, that's enough ginger, and then for the ginger garlic sauce, we basically need one clove of garlic, which is about five grams. So if that's about six, that's fine. All right, so let's tackle this, and what I do is I crush this little piece of garlic first. So now I'm going to put this into there. And the ginger garlic, so there's a lot of people peel this with a spoon. What I do is I break this up into little nubs. I tackle the first nub first, and then I just kind of peel it with a knife. That's the way I do it, but you know, you do whatever whatever is good for you. People say this wastes a little bit, but no, it's not that bad if you're good with it. And like I said, you could use a peeler or the spoon. Yeah, basically with a spoon, you're going to scrape the skin off, right? So I'm going to put that aside. That's one piece. You could use a small knife, too, but you know, I just learned how to use this cleaver for everything, and it's ready. Now, these ginger bits, actually, you could use these ginger bits into your in your soup, or for Judy, I think I'm going to set it aside. She's going to soak her feet with them. Okay, so that's the ginger garlic, and for the chili garlic, we need a three-piece inch piece of ginger, which is about 36 grams. There you go, 36. Let's weigh for the ginger garlic, because we needed 48. Oh, look at that. We cut off a lot, so 46, close enough for the ginger garlic sauce. Okay, very good. Okay, all my ginger is weighed out for the ginger garlic sauce and chili, and now we're just going to do a quick weight on there. It's six Holland chilies we're calling for, which is approximately 125 grams. We've got 124, approximately, so six chili, and we're going to cut those. Cut the ends off first. So we've got these cut, and deseeding or not deseeding is up to you. If you don't deseed, they're going to be a little bit spicier. If you deseed them, they're going to be less spicy, because the food processor is going to chop everything up. So I think what we're going to do is just cut these in half, so they're a little bit more manageable, and just process them the way they are. So that's the ingredients for the chili sauce, and then for the rice, we just basically need some garlic. So now let's get to the garlic. I'm just going to peel all this garlic. I cut off the ends, smash them to loosen the skins, and I just peel them like that. There's all kinds of ways that people peel garlic, but I'm kind of old school. We already have one clove that we set aside for the ginger garlic sauce. For the chili sauce, we need three cloves, and then for the rice, we need four cloves. So we need four and three. One, two, three, four, and three. Well, that's kind of a big one, so I'm going to do that and call this three. So that's three for the chili sauce, and then this is four for the rice. Oh, for the rice, this garlic needs to be minced, so that is for the rice. All right, we already portioned out our rock sugar, which is three tablespoons, or about 36 grams. So remember your kitchen scale is your friend. If you want to do that, you can just easily measure out 36 grams of rock salt or rock sugar. All right. Okay, so this is the fresh chicken that we bought from the Chinese supermarket. Something really important about that is that those are heritage chickens, and they're minimally processed, so the taste of your Hainan chicken is going to be greatly improved if you use these chickens. In fact, in Singapore and in Asia, you don't use any chickens other than these kind of heritage chickens. You get these chickens from the Chinese supermarket. Usually, they are Buddhist style, and they have the head on them and the feet. In this case, the feet were cut off. They're slow-growing chickens, meaning they're left to grow for a longer period of time, more so than the mass-market chickens that are typically grown 40 days or so, whatever the number is. But this chicken, you can even tell, right? So this chicken is a little bit more leaner. The meat just tastes so much better than, let's say, the mass-market chickens that you get at the supermarket. They're just different breeds, and this is something that I've learned over the years. I thought, oh, well, I'll just get a nice organic or natural chicken. Different breeds, and we do talk about this in our poached chicken recipe, Anita over at Bobo Chicken, who educated us on this. So now what we're going to do is clean the chicken. We have to clean the inside of the chicken and see if we can get some fat for the rice, okay? Off to the sink. So get a little water going on here, and what I'm going to first do is I'm going to take this out. This is like a lung, other organs. It's not a pretty thing to do, but you know, somebody's got to do it, so either the butcher's got to do it or you do it. The butcher's taking most of that out. Make sure you scrape it up into the cavity, and so that's basically it. So it's cleaned out, and now just open this. I don't want to splash too much, but we're doing this in the sink, folks, so you know, you're going to clean this up later with disinfectant or what have you, so we don't want people to freak out about this. We've been doing this for a lot of years. My mother, my grandmother before me, and now I'm doing it today, and Sarah and Caitlin are going to be doing it as we go along. Just got to be careful. Okay, so we want to cut a little bit of fat that we're going to render down for the rice. So there's a little bit of fat here. Cut it down. A lot of times in these chickens, you get a big giant clump of fat. In this case, we got better value. There's less fat. I'm going to put that aside here, and you know what? That's really not enough fat, so what I'm going to do is cut this flap off, this little skin flap off. It's just kind of flapping over here, and we're going to use that, and that should be good. Now what I'm going to do is, and this step for me, Judy explained it to me, it's going to make the skin better, but we put about a teaspoon, a tablespoon of salt and rub the chicken. For me, this is an optional step, but you know what? I'm going to follow her recipe. So I'm going to put a half tablespoon on one side, rub it. Says the skin is better, and I believe it, because this this one needs it. It's kind of rough on the back here, and I think that's, maybe that's what's happening, and remember this, this sink is clean, and I'm going to clean everything after this. Please readers, don't freak out. Yeah, but if you know what you're doing in the kitchen, you're okay, just like your grandmother used to do. Okay, so now I'm going to let this drip dry. It's pretty dry, and I'm going to put it on the plate, and it's ready to put in the water for poaching. All right, these are the aromatics. We cut the pieces of ginger and the two scallions, so we're going to throw this into the water, get that pot boiling. Okay, our water is boiling, so now we're going to lower this chicken, and just like in our post for the poached chicken, you're going to take it by the the head there. Make sure all the air is out, okay, and then now you can lift the chicken out again. Look at that beautiful color of the chicken, so you're not going to get that that color with a chicken, a mass market chicken. All right, let me poke it down and make sure there's no air in it. Yes, very few bubbles, but yeah, it's good to double check it. Now we're ready to cook our chicken. A note on this. Over the years, we've come up with various methods to get perfect silky poached chicken for various sizes of chickens and applications, but we're working on making all of our methods consistent for your ease and ours. After all, it's been a decade of cooking chicken, so here's what you do. Bring the water to a boil again. When it is just starting to again, turn the heat down. Keep it barely a simmer. Usually this is low or medium low heat, depending on the strength of your stove. There should be very little movement in the water, but it also shouldn't be completely still. Cover the pot and keep the heat around the lowest settings so the liquid continues to simmer slowly. Cook for about 30 to 35 minutes, roughly 10 to 11 minutes per pound. Depending on the size of your chicken, it may take more or less time to cook it through. If you have a chicken that's larger than three and a half pounds, it will take more like 40 to 50 minutes to cook. You can check to make sure the water is bubbling slowly and gently and not boiling too vigorously, but try to avoid uncovering the pot to take too many peaks while you're cooking the chicken. Okay, so I'm going to make the ginger garlic sauce first, and we've got the food processor out here. Pour everything in. Turn that on. So we're supposed to do this until a paste forms. So now it's stopped. I'm going to turn it off. I'm going to scrape it. Okay, I'm going to scrape this into a bowl, and it's not quite a paste, but it's close. We're going to have to cook this separately, so we're going to do this because we've got to grind the chili garlic sauce next. Okay, put that in. Grind the chilies until finely chopped. Scrape down the food processor once, at least once. So this is finely chopped. The other one was a paste. This one's a chop. I don't get it. Here we go. The whole lime. Here we go. Oh, juicy. This is a nice lime. One teaspoon of salt, a teaspoon of sugar, a half teaspoon of sesame oil, one teaspoon rice vinegar. Okay, we've got our oil in there, and now we've got to cook the garlic ginger into a sauce. Add a pinch of salt. So this is just to take an edge off of these aromatics. Gently fry the ginger and garlic until it's aromatic and just slightly caramelized. You want it to be just cooked so that it no longer has that spicy raw flavor, but you don't want it to cook for too long as you actually want to form a bit of an emulsion with the sauce, and if you cook it for too long, we found that it could have a tendency to separate. All right, so we're going to make the sweet dark soy sauce with a third cup of water and the after that we're going to add the dark soy sauce. Got to let it cook right now. And then, okay, we're going to pour the dark soy in here. Nice and thick. After you've added the dark soy sauce, let it bubble and thicken slightly until it coats a spoon, and then transfer it to a sauce dish. All right, we're going to make the rice. Now, we have not as much chicken fat as I like it to, but you got to put a little bit of oil to start. Every time you render fat, you need a little bit of oil to start. Cook for one to two minutes or until you have about one tablespoon of rendered fat. You don't have to be overly precious about this step. Just make sure that the fat gets crispy and it looks like most of the oil is extracted. All right, I'm going to take this out, the rendered fat out, and in goes the garlic and the rice. Okay, toast the rice. I think we're going to toast the rice for about a minute. This is going to be good. You want to do this on a low heat. You don't want to burn the rice. Okay, we're going to transfer this toasted rice to the bowl, to the rice cooker. Hot, that is. Kind of caramelized and sticky. All right. Okay, so we had three US cups of rice, which is actually four rice cooker cups because there's three quarters of a cup of those rice cooker cups. So we're actually going to fill it up to that four line with some stock from this chicken. I'm just going to ladle it until we get it up to the four line. Careful not to get the onion in there, the scallion, but I don't want it to be too horrible. Okay, getting close. That's about it right there. Okay, here we go. This is the beauty of it. Just hit the button. Let's get this chicken out. So we're going to take this out, liquid drip out, and we're going to give it a good solid poke here. That looks like it's done. Okay, so we're going to put it into the ice bath now. The most meaty part here. Let's see how the juice is. The juice is pretty clear. They're all pink. Let me try this one. Yes, it's a little bit pink. So we're going to leave it back in. It's going to be kind of heavy. There we go. I want to make sure that I get the ice water here. Good. Okay, let's bring this over to the sink and the counter. Okay, I'm going to turn it over again so we get even cooling. Actually, I can do this too. Okay, very good. It's actually nice to get this breast down so we can stop the breast meat from cooking faster. Yeah, I don't want it to be stone cold. The purpose of this is actually mostly for the skin so the skin has a snappy texture. Rice is done. Smells good. Let's see. Oh yeah. It's chesting up a little bit of oil on the rice. This is good. I'll tell you right now without even trying. All right, let me go cut the chicken. Delicate, delicate. To cut the chicken, a cleaver or heavy-duty chef's knife is the ideal tool for the job as most knives are too delicate to cut through chicken bones. For a more detailed tutorial on how to cut a whole chicken Chinese style, check out our Cantonese cooked chicken video. Okay, so we're going to make a little bit of breast meat. Okay, that looks good. It's nice. bowl of the chicken stock that the chicken cooked in. To make it taste even better, add a pinch of salt and a couple pinches of chopped scallions. I get to eat. Intense flavor. I need a chopstick. Sorry. Let me get a meaty piece. The breast looks perfect. That is a very Shanghai move right there. I know. And then Cantonese. How about that? A little ginger. Wow, the chicken is so good. Oh, I could have used more ginger for that bite. Was it a job well done? Job well done. Wow. Great One teaspoon of salt. Half teaspoon of sugar. Half teaspoon sesame oil. I already memorized it. Okay, that's it. Get the spatula out.