The Perfect Boiled Chicken Dish (Hainanese Chicken Rice)

What comes to mind when I say boiled chicken? Dry, no flavor? Or maybe that first week of the year when you decided to be healthy and get in shape by boiling chicken breasts. We all know how that turned out. Well for me, I think of one of the best chicken and rice dishes out there. Hainanese chicken rice, made up of three main components. Chicken, rice, and sauce. To me, they're all equally as important. To start, we want to grab a high quality chicken. This is a free range chicken and I remove its feet because they make it really awkward to work with when boiling in a pot. Once their feet have been cut off, I'll trim off any excess fat I see on the body. There wasn't too much on my chicken but be sure to save this for later. Give our chicken a thorough rinse and set to the side. Now if you don't want to work with the whole chicken, I get it. But you can actually just use some chicken quarters. Follow the exact same steps but it'll just cook a little bit faster. Bring a large pot of water up to a boil, this was five and a half liters, and season with a few tablespoons of salt, sliced ginger, scallion, smashed garlic, and I like to add turmeric powder for a tint of yellow color. I'll first dissolve the powder in a ladle, then pour that into the water to prevent any clumping. Dunk our chicken into the water for five seconds and then lift. Repeat three times and what this does is tighten up the skin. Cover with a lid, let it simmer for 45 minutes, then immediately drop our chicken into an ice bath for 10 minutes. Now this is a very important step because it does two things. First, it stops the chicken from cooking so it stays super moist, yes, even the breast. And number two, it creates a classic springy texture on the chicken. So as I said earlier, the rice is just as, if not more important, than the actual chicken. I'll usually begin preparing the rice portion as the chicken is cooking. This flavorful and aromatic rice begins with shallots, ginger, and garlic. That's two small shallots, four to five cloves of garlic, and about the same amount of ginger. They all get a nice chop in preparation for the rice. Into a medium hot pan, add one tablespoon of oil along with the aromatics we just cut up. Continue cooking for one minute until fragrant, then add two cups of washed rice, one teaspoon of turmeric powder. Again, this is optional, but yellow rice just makes me feel good. Continue stirring until there is an even color across each grain of rice, then transfer into a rice cooker. At this point, the chicken should be close to finished. Make sure you place the chicken into the ice bath first. And now we can take two and a quarter cups of chicken broth created from cooking the chicken to cook our rice. Let our rice cooker do its magic, and our rice is done. Now moving to our final part, sauce. There's two to go through. First, and my favorite, is our ginger scallion oil. Four ingredients, ginger, scallion, salt, and oil. You want to grab a nice sized block of ginger and dice it up until extremely fine. This might take a while, but you want it to be at least as finely diced as this. Add the ginger into a bowl along with chopped scallions and salt. Heat up half a cup of neutral oil, and we're going to bring back our reserved chicken fat to render and flavor our scallion oil. Once our oil hits 400 Fahrenheit, pour it over our ginger and scallions, mix, and season to taste with salt. So I didn't have that much ginger on me, but if you're making this, you should make a massive jar and just leave it in the fridge. Put it on any type of rice and meat. Our second sauce is a sweet chili sauce. Into a blender, I'm going to add three of these long red chilies, and these are really mild in spice, but this bird's eye chili is very spicy, which is why I'm only adding a half. A little knob of ginger, a couple cloves of garlic, lime juice, sugar, salt, chicken stock. Oh shit. So that blender just broke, so I'm using this one. Great. And then just adjust the sweetness or salt levels. Our final step is just to debone our chicken, which requires a slight amount of chicken anatomy. First, using kitchen shears, I removed the backbone from the chicken, then cut through the breastbone on the other side, and you'll be left with two halves of a chicken. Each half has a chicken quarter, breast, and wing. We're going to first separate each of these three sections, and the general guideline afterwards is to use a knife and make small cuts along the bone until you're able to completely remove it without cutting into the skin side. Might seem a little complicated, but after doing it a few times, it gets much easier. Then cut up our chicken, plate it up, finish with a brush of sesame oil, and you're left with the most beautiful, perfect plate of Hainanese chicken rice. We did it. Let's give it a try. Grab some rice, piece of our thigh, and our sauce, and this is a perfect bite. Cheers. Chicken's juicy, not too salty, perfect with the sauce, and the rice is cooked perfectly. If you've never tried this, make it at home. I've had it at a lot of restaurants, and honestly, making it at home, this version right here is the best one I've had.