Home    News    ExploreGD     Business     Good Time    GD In Brief 

Chinese>>

News Of The Week

During the July Food Festival, Singaporeans may vote Hainanese chicken rice as the nation's most distinctive dish, even over fish head curry and pepper crabs. This consensus supposes that time has seen a uniquely Singaporean metamorphosis of a dish brought to our shores by immigrant forefathers. A chance to put the proposition to the test came one August, when a delegation of chefs from the Hainan Overseas Chinese hotel, arrived to cook "genuine" Hainanese chicken rice at the Harbour View Dai-Ichi hotel. Tony Ho, sous chef of the Dai-Ichi and his counterpart from Hainan Island, Feng Qi Xu, compared notes.

In Hainan and Singapore, chicken rice comes with three dips. There is always chilli sauce and ground ginger, but while we offer thick dark soya sauce as a third choice, in Hainan it is an oyster sauce-garlic mix. Another difference, India and Malay influences have made us like our chilli dips hotter. And while the Hainanese sauce is watered down with white vinegar, we prefer the fruity sourness of local limes (sambal belacan style) in a thick sauce enriched with chicken dripping.

The differences may seem small, but since most of us will swear we cannot eat chicken rice without shiok chilli, it seems that sauce for the Singapore bird, even if chicken à la Singapore, is, as I contend, chicken à la Hainan, the two being chicken à la Cantonese.

This oneness is a recent phenomena. As late as the mid-60s there was a clear distinction between Hainanese chicken rice and Cantonese pak cham kai (white cut chicken). The Hainanese would robustly boil big, fat hens to render lots of oil to make rice fragrant. The Cantonese insisted on tender-fleshed younger birds cooked red-at-the-bone, melt-in-the-mouth, even though these chickens never had enough fat in them to make tasty rice. So strictly speaking, chicken rice is Hainanese. The Cantonese dish was a delicacy enjoyed for its own sake.

However, the two cooking styles have now coalesced. Cantonese chefs offer chicken flavoured rice with pak cham kai, while Hainanese chefs now cook younger birds, Cantonese style; in water brought on and off to the boil, finally plunging the birds in an ice bath, to create the supple, jelly-like skin characteristic of Cantonese pak cham kai.

Notwithstanding this merger of cooking styles, one difference remains to distinguish the locally cooked chicken from that prepared in Hainan. Singapore chefs boil chickens in water flavoured with garlic and ginger, then later serve up some of this broth as soup, using the remainder to cook rice with. The Hainan chef cooks in a pork and chicken bone stock, which is not served as soup or used for cooking rice, but is topped up with water as necessary and reused. In time this will become a rich master stock (lu) that will add a distinct meatier flavour to the chickens cooked in it.

A penchant for such master stocks is very Chinese, and tales abound of more than hundred year-old lu's still in use. To nurture such venerable stocks, the Hainan chef will cook rice using either a chicken stock especially prepared for this purpose, or will uniquely add coconut milk to the pot to make an alternative rice tasting richer than our nasi lemak.

The Seabreeze coffeehouse at the Dai-Ichi has recreated Hainan style coconut-flavoured chicken rice but to Singaporean taste. The rice is perfumed with lemon grass and pandans, not used in Hainan, and the chilli sauce is thick and rich, soured with lime, the way we like it.

Editor: Weiwei

By:  Source：