Chicken Rice

Chicken rice. Recipe by Adam Liaw.

I prepared this for dinner. ;-) My cousin is a lucky boy. The recipe I referred to resulted in a very subtle flavour, closer to what you'd get in a restaurant rather than a hawker center. If you prefer hawker cuisine then you might want to double all the seasoning (garlic, ginger, salt, soy, etc).

Addendum 22/07/12: I wrote to Adam about the seasoning and this was his reply:

Hi *******,
There should be enough flavour in the recipe as it is, but generally if you find that the flavour of a dish needs a bit more punch just check to make sure you’ve seasoned it correctly – that it’s salty enough. Salt intensifies flavours so that may be your problem.

If you want a stronger flavoured stock (again, it should be fine just as it is if it’s correctly seasoned), I’d suggest adding more chicken to deepen the flavour. My grandma sometimes makes a “double boiled” stock, which is to say that she will cook one chicken in water to produce the first stock, then remove the first chicken and cook another one in the same stock. Of course, with this you end up with twice as much chicken too.

A lot of the strong flavour of Hainanese chicken rice comes from the condiments – the sesame/soy dressing, the chilli sauce and the ginger spring onion sauce. The chicken and rice should be very fragrant and tasty, but not overpoweringly strong with flavour themselves.
Hope this helps!

Adam

I was a bit worried in retrospect that I may have offended him with my comment coz I remembered that you never tell an Asian mom that her cooking 'could use more salt' but he was good about it and provided some helpful feedback.

I actually tried the dish again today and the flavour was more pronounced that it was last night (go leftovers!) but I'll definitely try more salt next time. I'm not very good with salt because I tend to worry about adding too much, which is hard to undo. Double boiled stock also seems like an interesting idea but I'm not sure if I want to eat two whole chickens in a row!