Instant Pot Claypot Chicken Rice | One Pot Recipe

Hi everyone, it's Lisa. Today we're making instant pot Chinese chicken rice. This recipe is actually inspired by the Cantonese clay pot rice which uses Chinese sausages called lap cheong. These sausages are kind of sweet, kind of salty. There are many ways to eat them but today we're going to use this in a quick and easy one pot dinner recipe. To get started, let's prepare the chicken so it can marinate for an hour. I'm using chicken thighs today but you can use chicken breast for this recipe as well and I'm just going to cut them into bite-sized pieces. Next, grate the ginger and then let's make the chicken marinade. Add in cornstarch, sesame oil, kicap manis which is an Indonesian sweet soy sauce. I've probably butchered the pronunciation but if you don't have this sweet soy sauce, you can use a combination of dark soy sauce and sugar instead. Now add in the oyster sauce, the grated ginger, a dash of white pepper, and five spice powder. Be careful with the five spice powder. If you add too much, it will be really overpowering. Mix it up then cover and refrigerate for about an hour. While the chicken is marinating, we can use this time to rehydrate our dried shiitake mushrooms and dried shrimp. I love using dried shrimp in my recipes. They're really versatile and give dishes a nice depth of flavor and umami. Once they are rehydrated, squeeze the water out of the mushrooms. Don't throw away the mushroom water. It's packed with lots of flavor and you can use it to cook the rice. Cut the stems off and then I'm going to keep two shiitakes whole for taking pictures later and slice the rest of them up. For the shrimp, we're going to drain the water and then chop it all up. For aromatics, we're going to mince up some garlic and chop up the white parts of the green onion. For garnish later, we'll use the green parts of the green onions and some cilantro. Now let's talk about the lap cheong. They typically look like this and today we'll be using two of these in addition to the pre-diced version of these sausages. The pre-diced version is literally the same thing but it's diced just as the packaging suggests. They look like this and I like using this because it just breaks apart in the rice when it's cooked and you get the yummy flavors in each bite. For the rice, it's important to use jasmine rice. Using short grain rice for this recipe will just turn out mushy. We're going to use the mushroom liquid to cook the rice and I've tested various ratios for rice to liquid and I found that using just a little less water than rice works out perfectly. Just rinse the rice until the water runs clear. Now let's get cooking. Turn your instant pot to the saute function and turn it up to high. Once it's hot, drizzle in some oil and add in the aromatics. First, add in the green onions and saute. Then add in the dried shrimp and saute for about 30 seconds before adding the garlic. Then saute until the garlic starts to turn golden brown and then add in the rice. Turn off the heat and saute the rice until it's no longer white and takes on a little bit of color. Next, we're going to add in the mushroom water but it's important to let the instant pot cool down a little before doing so. I made the mistake of adding the water while it was still hot and a lot of it evaporated so I had to add in more water later. Now level the rice by shaking the pot a bit then add in the marinated chicken on top. As you can see, the pot is still so hot and the water is bubbling away and evaporating. You really want to avoid this and add water only when it is relatively cooled down. Just don't make the same mistake I made while shooting this video. Next, we're going to add in the mushrooms, the two lap cheongs and the diced lap cheong as well. So we're just going to leave everything on top like that and shut the lid. Make sure the vent is on sealing and set the instant pot to manual pressure for 10 minutes. Now while the rice is cooking, let's make the drizzling sauce. I call it the drizzling sauce because I don't know what else to call it but basically we're going to mix together soy sauce, oyster sauce, scallion oil and some toasted sesame oil. If you don't have any scallion oil, you can use shallot oil or even peanut oil instead. When the rice is ready, throw a towel over the vent so the steam doesn't get everywhere and quick release the pressure. We're going to open the lid and drizzle in the drizzling sauce. Now we're going to put the lid back on and leave the instant pot in its keep warm function for seven to ten minutes. Sometimes you might even get a crispy bottom like you would with clay pot rice. After 10 minutes, remove the lap cheong and fluff up the rice, mixing all the ingredients together. See, you can see a little bit of the crispy bottom start to happen here. If I had left it on longer, I would get more crispy rice at the bottom. As you fluff up the rice, the diced lap cheong will break apart and mix into everything and that's exactly what we want here. Slice up the two lap cheongs we took out and serve it with the rice. Garnish with the green onions and cilantro that we chopped earlier and look at that. Isn't that gorgeous? This instant pot meal is just so delicious. Every spoonful is a umami bomb in your mouth. I literally stood over this clay pot and ate a lot of this rice on my own. I hope you guys give it a try. I'll see you guys in the next video.