Hainanese Chicken Rice - Emily Koh

Hainanese Chicken Rice

3 chicken legs

2 thumbsized pieces of ginger

2 heads of garlic (approx)

4 stalks green onions

2 cups (dry) rice

salt

sesame oil

chicken schmaltz/neutral oil

dark sweet soy sauce

sriracha

1 lime

sugar

(chinese cooking wine)

1 english cucumber

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Clean the chicken, trim fat off the chicken (keep the fat!), scrub chicken skin with coarse salt and remove feathers if any, then rub some salt and sesame oil all over the chicken pieces.

Place chicken in one layer on the bottom of a 3qt pot (they'll fit, but it will be a tight fit), and add water until the chicken pieces are all covered. Add salt (like pasta water), a glug of chinese cooking wine, 1/2 a thumb sized garlic (sliced), 1/2 head of garlic (smashed), and 2 green onion (smashed). Bring to a boil, boil for 5 minutes, then cover and turn off the heat and let it all sit for 40minutes. (This will give you nicely moist chicken, which might be undercooked for American tastes, but in Singapore, when the marrow is brown, the chicken is overcooked.) Poke the chicken when that 40mins is up--the juices should run clear, but if not, you can keep it in the water for longer. 

While chicken is sitting around getting poched, grate the remaining garlic and ginger, and the white stalks of the 2 remaining stalks of green onions and make a paste. It works in a food processor too, but you might have to add oil to it for it to blend well. 

Wash the rice thoroughly, then let drain to dry.  

In a pot (whatever pot you cook your rice in--I use my instant pot or rice cooker), fry up the chicken fat pieces so that the schmaltz is rendered. Add the ginger garlic green onion paste, and fry until fragrant and slightly browned. If there's not enough fat to fry the ginger-garlic paste, add more oil (it's not a healthy dish, I've got to say!) When it's nice and brown, add the rice, fry the rice until the rice is glossy and shiny. 

Prepare a large bowl of ice water just before the chicken is done. When the chicken is done, take it out of the poaching liquid, and immediately dunk the chicken pieces in the ice water. Leave the chicken in the ice water. Don't skip this, this is VERY important--it stops the residual cooking of the chicken.

Add chicken poaching liquid (I use a 1:1 rice to water ratio in the instant pot, but do whatever is normal for you, and keep it on the drier side) and add salt to taste (there's salt in the poaching liquid already, so really taste it) to the rice, then cook the rice as you would cook rice.

To a small bowl, add 2 tablespoons of sriracha, juice of 1 large lime, salt, white pepper, 1.5x the amount of lime juice in sugar, and mix. This is your chili sauce. You might want to make more if you like spicy stuff.

In another small bowl, add 1/4 cup of chicken poaching liquid, 2 tablespoons of soy sauce, 1 teaspoon sugar, and a drizzle of sesame oil. This is the sauce to pour over the chicken.

Cut up the greens of the green onions for garnish. Slice up one english cucumber.

Have a small dish for dark semi-sweet soy sauce.

Cut up the chicken legs (usually, it gets cleaved into bite sized pieces with bones in them, but I debone it and cut it into pieces.) Plate the chicken, then pour the soy/poaching liquid/sugar/sesame sauce over the chicken, then garnish with chopped green onions.

Serve chicken on top of rice, with cucumber slices and the two sauces (chili sauce, and the dark semi-sweet soy sauce).