Singapore (via Hainan, China)
Hainanese Chicken Rice
Poached chicken, fragrant rice cooked in the broth, three dipping sauces — Singapore's national dish hides its complexity inside complete simplicity.
Rice is cooked in chicken fat.
The trick of the dish is the rice. After the chicken is poached, the cook saves the fat and the broth, fries the rice with garlic and ginger in the chicken fat until each grain is glossy, then cooks it in the chicken stock instead of water. What ends up in the bowl looks like plain white rice and tastes like the chicken it was cooked beside. This is the whole dish.
4 · Plate
Singapore (via Hainan, China)
Hainanese Chicken Rice
Poached chicken, fragrant rice cooked in the broth, three dipping sauces — Singapore's national dish hides its complexity inside complete simplicity.
A dish of the Hainan diaspora. Wenchang chicken — a Hainan-island village dish of poached chicken with oil rice — travelled with Hainanese immigrants to Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, where each city took it in a different direction. Singapore standardised the trio of sauces. Bangkok added pandan to the rice and a fermented-soybean dip. Hong Kong kept the dish closer to the Hainanese village original. All four are correct.
The cook of chicken rice is a meditation on temperature. The chicken is plunged into rapidly boiling water, the heat turned off, and the bird poached in residual heat for 45 minutes — gentle enough that the meat stays silky and the joint between the thigh and the spine is still just-pink. Then a cold ice-water bath to tighten the skin into a fine gelatin sheath. A great chicken rice has a finger-pinch quality at the breast that no oven-roasted bird can match.
Three sauces, all required.
Bright-red chili-garlic-lime sauce. Thick dark soy. Fresh-grated ginger in oil. Each piece of chicken gets a dip in one or another; mixing them at the table is allowed. The plate without all three is a Hainan plate, not a Singapore plate.