Kai faan

Over Labour Day weekend, I made one of my most favouritest foods in the world...Hainanese chicken rice!

This is meant to be a dessert blog, but I had to share. Hainanese chicken rice or Hoi Lam kai faan (Cantonese for "Hainan chicken rice") is a complete meal by itself. A whole chicken cooked in water that forms a stock that makes the soup, rice and the chili-based condiment (at least that's how my Mum did it). The chicken and soup I usually flavour with ginger, garlic and spring onions. For the rice, I render some of the chicken fat to which I add a couple slices of ginger and then the rice to coat. This goes into the rice cooker with some of the stock and salt. I even found some frozen pandan (aka pandanus aka screwpine) leaves that you tie in a knot and lay it on top of the rice to give it this lovely, indescribable fragrance.

Here's the chili condiment. My mum would pound fresh chilies with garlic and ginger and add lime juice, salt and a little chicken stock to the mix. Fresh chilies, at least the kind I'm familiar with, are hard to come by. There are jalapeños and serranos and Thai bird chilies, but the regular long and skinny red chilies aren't usually available. I don't even know what variety they are. So, I substituted the fresh chilies with sambal oelek from a bottle. It's not quite the same, but beggars can't be choosers.

When the chicken is done, I plunge it in ice-cold water which is suppose to give the skin a smooth texture and form a thin layer of jelly between the skin and meat. I haven't been terribly successful getting the cooking times just right. So far, there's been no jelly under the skin for me.

Here's what it looks like all laid out. The chicken is deboned and cut into almost-bite-sized pieces on top of a bed of cucumber slices and a thin mixture of soy sauce, sesame oil and more chicken stock is poured over it. I've garnished it here with more spring onions, but cilantro works too. I like to add cabbage and tofu to the stock to make the soup. Firm tofu, when boiled for a long time, causes little holes to form, filling with whatever liquid it's cooked in and giving it a spongy, juicy texture.

Still more technical difficulties

Turns out that batch that was stuck on the media card weren't really stuck at all. Some weirdness previewed what was on the card as old images, but copying them anyways and then viewing them set them to rights.

I then proceeded to re-screw up and now all I have of a fourth dessert are tiny thumbnails. *sigh*

While I try and recover that last one, here's a picture of something baked but not dessert. These are gourgères, cheese puffs. Basically pâte à choux flavoured with a little parmesan and gruyere. Very yummy warm with drinkies :)