Chicken Stock. Slowcooker. Hainanese Chicken Rice

Southwest 5 to 7, occasionally gale 8.

Rough or very rough, becoming moderate or rough.

Showers.

Good, occasionally moderate.

 

 

 

Today`s dish is one of the recipes I wish I hadn’t agreed to write. First of all it is generally a quite time consuming dish, second I am not that fond of chicken and thirdly, it seemed nearly impossible to make for one. But I can be quite stubborn and after my failed third attempt with the broth I was so furious that I wanted to crack it. And if it means eating chicken for a year. Fortunately I cracked it around the sixth try.

So why is it so tricky to make at home (unless you follow my recipe)? Most recipes start with “Poach a chicken in chicken stock”. That`s right, you need to make a chicken stock first. The ones who don’t start with that sentence ask you do poach 3 chicken in water and use the resulting stock. A bit much for one person. But it does not end here. A typical example for poaching that bird would be: “Heat the stock and add the halved chicken. ...Turn the heat immediately to zero and poach that chicken in the warm water for 20 minutes. Take the chicken out, reboil the stock, add chicken and repeat. Repeat that step 3 more times”. 

Crickey..life is too short to do that. Especially if you want a chicken (soup) for the soul because life is unfair and you are down with a cold.

So I started to experiment with shop bought chicken stock.

Dont do it. Never ever. While it is not exactly vile tasting, it will not result in a Hainanese Chicken Rice. Plus most shop bought chicken stocks contain palm oil.

So I am afraid you have to make your own stock. From a whole chicken, or some 2 kilos of cheap chicken wings; but I would advise against the latter. You see, the dish has very few ingredients (apart from the sauces) and you really need to rely on good quality. While you cant use the cooked chicken (from my stock method) for the Hainanese Chicken Rice, it is still good enough for sandwiches or in another soupy dish.

And yes, you will end up with far too much stock for one. But nothing stops you to freeze the leftover stock, either in portions for another dish, or in these plastic ice cube bags so you always have one cube as your “chicken stock cube”.

Now.. what is Hainanese Chicken Rice. I had my first in Malaysia and nearly did not order it. The translation was “plain boiled cold chicken with rice and spicy sauces”.

Hrmph. Cant say that plain boiled chicken is on top of my list of scrumptious foods. And cold. And probably chewy like cardboard.

I am glad that I ordered it. It is a mindboggling combination of silky, tender, cold (room temperature) chicken, hot fatty rice which has been cooked in the stock and a small cup of a chicken stock which can only be described as the mother of all chicken essence. On top of it you get often at least two spicy sauces to dip your chicken in, often made with the chicken stock too. It is not about the chicken. The dish is called chicken rice. In fact, if pressed, I would give you the chicken and just eat the rice with the soup and the condiments.

Now, how to get a perfect chicken soup and silky chicken without too much faff? The answer is a slow cooker.

A few years ago a slow cooker became fashionable for a short time and since then the hype has died in the UK. I never understood this. I always use my slow cooker; in fact I have two sizes. If you don’t have an oven, get a slow cooker. If you work out of the house and want to come home to the smell of food but don’t want the danger of an oven, get a slow cooker.

If you are ill and all you want to do is sleep, you hopefully have a slow cooker. 

The cheapest at Argos is £10 (1.5 litre, good for one person, the big one £15). Aldi and Lidl have them sometimes for £8.

Dont buy one with all the whistles, you don’t need that.

If you like the idea of a timer function (so it starts at 3 pm just in time for your coming home at 7pm) buy for a few pounds a timer to go onto your circuit. No need to get a slow cooker with that feature for £60.

While a slow cooker is perfect for all kinds of cheaper cuts of meat, it is also perfect for poaching.

A chicken in a slow cooker with water, on low, will give you after 3 hours tender chicken and a good broth. After 5 hours the chicken meat is a bit “tired”, but still good enough for sandwiches, and an insane good broth. If you don’t mind the chicken but are after the best broth ever, chuck everything in the slow cooker, go to sleep and wake up 8 hours to the smell of a broth which is probably the best you ever had.

And once you have the broth (and a slow cooker), the Hainanese Chicken Rice is a breeze.

Hainanese Chicken Rice with a chilli ginger dip

Part 1: The broth (can be made at the beginning of the cold season and frozen in portions when you need it)

1 chicken (at least free range, better corn fed free range, even better organic, ultimate is a organic soup chicken from a farmers market= a soup chicken is an old chicken, too tough to eat as a roast chicken but perfect for broth due to the muscular flesh. If you can get it, it is also cheap as chips)

1 tsp salt

1 bunch of spring onions (white only)

10 cm of fresh ginger, no need to peel, just cut it in small slices

3 garlic cloves, no need to peel

1.5 litre of water.

Take the fat out of the chicken and keep it. If you continue to cook later just put it in the fridge, if not, freeze it. Cut the chicken up as small or as big as you want it, put into the slow cooker. Add salt, ginger, garlic, spring onions and water and put slow cooker on low.

Go back to sleep and wake up a few hours later rested. Or go to work. Or read a book. You are aiming for at least 4 hours doing nothing in the kitchen. The longer, the better.

Drain, either throw the content of the sieve away or take bits out and use for something else. Freeze the broth if desired.

Part 2: the chicken

2 chicken thighs

5 cm of ginger (no need to peel but cut into slices)

Enough chicken broth to fully cover the thighs in your slow cooker.

Heat broth in the slow cooker on high. Once it is hot, turn to low. In the meantime loosen the skin from the flesh without ripping it off completely and push the ginger slices under the skin. Add to the cooling broth for one hour. Either go back to bed during that hour to nurture your cold or pretend you work (aka during “ research on the internet” when in fact you either look at cute cat videos or get stuck in the sidebar of shame of the Daily Mail). And if you want to feel smug for being organized, put your rice (next step) into cold water for one hour).  Take the thighs out of the slow cooker, cover with a bit of broth and let cool down to room temperature. Let the stock bubble away.

Step 3: Time for some 10 minute action. The rice.

The chicken fat

1 sprinkle of salt

2/3 cup of jasmine rice

2x 3/4/ cups of the chicken stock (in short, double the amount of stock to rice but a bit less= do double and take maybe 2 tbsp of stock out again.)

The greens from the spring greens, chopped in small slices (optional)

Or/and, if you can get hold of these:

2 pandang leaves (but this is really optional. Dont sweat if you cant get them).

Soak the rice for one hour in cold water (see above). Drain and wash. Add the chicken fat to a pot on low and let melt, at least halfway, so you have at least 1 tbsp of chicken fat.

Add the drained rice, the salt and stir. Every grain should be glistening with fat. Add the stock, let boil and once it boils, turn down as low at it gets. From that moment DO NOT stir the rice. If you have pandang leaves add them now. Cover the pot with a lid and put the timer on 10 minutes. DONT stir, don’t touch.

Your stock in the slow cooker should still bubble away.

While you wait for the rice to finish do the sauce(s) and the condiments. Once the rice is nearly done, add the slices of spring onion and give it another 2 minutes. The rice should be soft but not too mushy. Once done, fish the pandang leaves and the left over from the chicken fat out and put onto a plate.

Step 4: The sauce(s) and side dishes

Apart from the cucumbers the rest is optional. You could either make it dead easy and just mix dark soya sauce with a bit of chicken stock; you could get a jar of chopped chillies, take a spoon out, add a bit of lime juice and a bit of chicken stock and sesame oil. You could do both and also a third sauce. You can buy a sauce. Or you could do the following:

1 few slivers of ginger

Slivers of one garlic clove

Slivers of at least one birds eye chilli

1 bit of rock sugar (or kandis)

Half the juice of a lime or lemon

1 tbsp of neutral oil

If you wish to do so, add a few drops of fish sauce (I always wish to do so)

Mix. Or pound all in a pestle and mortar and thus mix.

Half a cucumber, peeled and cut into slices.

To serve

The hot fatty glistening rice

The coldish chicken

The sliced cucumber

One sauce or as many as you wish

A cup of the chicken broth from the slow cooker which had the extra benefit of more chicken and is now reduced to a golden broth of insane intensity.

To eat:

Dip the chicken first into the hot soup and then into your dipping sauce(s).

Eat the rice.

In between clean your palate with the simple cucumber.

Have a sip of soup.

Repeat.

Or you could be a glutton like me and first eat that rice. Then drink the soup. And end with the chicken dipped in sauce.

No one judges you if you drink the soup first.

Verdict:

Okay, if you have come so far you might be exhausted from reading it. It sounds like a job for a professional kitchen. And it is. But if you count the time you actually worked, it will be less than 30 minutes. If you do the broth in advance and the chicken in advance (but take both, plus the chicken fat, out of the freezer in the morning), you will work a total of 10 minutes to get dinner.

And do yourself a favour and never take the fat from the broth. It is important to get the rice right and keep the chicken juicy.

Despite me mentioning several times fat, it is actually a low calorie dish. There is no extra fat. Just the fat from a chicken.

As to the photo. It is not mine. I really need a new camera.

It is from a website from someone who seems to be obsessed with Hainanese Chicken Rice and is posting pictures of that dish wherever he finds them. I really did try to get the name of the photographer but no chance. If it is yours and you wish me to remove it, contact me and I am happy to oblige.

And if you want to such a perfect looking chicken, put it into an ice bath (bowl with ice cubes and water) just after you took it out from the broth.

The spirit of Pasqualina. Easter quiche with wild garlic, artichokes and hardboiled eggs.

South or southwest 6 to gale 8.

Rough or very rough.

Rain or showers.

Moderate or good, occasionally poor.

 

Pasqua, the Italian word for Easter, lents its name to the glorious Ligurian dish called Torta Pasqualina.  I made the simplified Ottolenghi recipe many times (without the celery), not only at Easter; but I always wondered if you could do it as well with left-over hardboiled eggs (in my world left-over Easter eggs are not the chocolate variety, but mountains of hardboiled and painted eggs). So this year I decided to give it a try.

The original Torta Pasqualina is done with a variety of greens, either Swiss chard, beetroot leaves, spinach or artichokes. Plus herbs. And you can either mix everything together (bar the eggs) or do it the incredible complicated and tricky way as shown in the video on the first link.

However a visit to my children yesterday, where we then ended up in Whitstable eating oysters at the seaside, resulted also in bags of wild garlic. I have written about wild garlic last year, and can only urge you to give it a try if you can get hold of it. But do it quickly. This year we have a very early season for them.

So it was quite obvious that I don’t buy Swiss chard but use the wild garlic instead. And a jar of artichokes hearts in olive oil screamed: Me, me, me.

On top of it I had less puff pastry than I thought, so the obligatory cover was out of question.

By now I was so far removed from a Torta Pasqualina that I could only call my dish “in the spirit of Pasqualina“. But it tasted ace!

Quiche with wild garlic, artichokes and hardboiled eggs

Part of a sheet of puff pastry (about 80-100gr)

100gr wild garlic, chopped very fine

Zest of one unwaxed lemon

3 artichoke hearts in oil, drained

A few sprigs of fresh herbs (I used basil, dill and flat parsley)

5 tbsp ricotta

1 tbsp grated parmesan cheese

1 raw egg

1 hardboiled egg

1 tbsp of olive oil

Salt, nutmeg and freshly milled black pepper

Cut the puff pastry so it fills a small tart or quiche tin. Put it in the tin, cut around the edge and put into the fridge.

Heat oil in a small pan; add the washed and drained wild garlic (stalks and all), the lemon zest and a bit of salt to the oil until it wilts. Add the artichoke hearts, which have been roughly cut, and continue to cook, until all the water (from the washed garlic) has evaporated. Put into a food mixer and chop a bit finer. Let cool. Once it is cold (or lukewarm) add the ricotta, grated parmesan, nutmeg, pepper and the raw egg to that mixture. Give it more chops with the food processor until nicely mixed but bits can be still seen (you don’t want a green mush). Taste, you might need more salt and pepper (remember that in a quiche or tart you need a strong tasting filling, once the egg has been cooked it will tone it down- one of the reasons quiches often taste boring). Or you could add a bit more parmesan.

Preheat oven to 180C. Peel your hardboiled egg and cut it in half lengthways. Take pastry out of the fridge and cover the bottom with about 2 tbsp of the filling. Lay the two egg halves cut side down onto the filling, fill the whole tin with the garlic mixture and make sure the eggs are covered too. You can go pretty high, even make a little “dome”, the filling will set quickly and shrink later to a flat level.

Into the oven and bake until the top of the quiche is nicely browned (about 35-45 minutes). Eat at room temperature.

Verdict:

It tasted absolutely ace. However the photo above is not exactly the dish. Well..how to explain this.

My landlord has put recently a new fire-alarm system into the whole house. If you have a hot shower..it goes off.

So when I opened the oven door to take the quiche out, the fire-alarm went off. I was so startled that I dropped the quiche, fortunately onto a plate. No way could I photograph that mess.

So I went out to get more puff pastry and start again. In the middle of the preparation I realised I had also run out of ricotta. So I mixed 3 tbsp of home made Tzatziki with 2 tbsp of mascarpone.

Maybe the extra garlic from the Tzatziki carried it from the very good into the insanely good (remember, just because it looks like a mess doesn’t mean you cant eat it). So..maybe add a smashed garlic clove in as well.

Happy Easter.                    Buona Pasqua.

Cooking pasta. As in cooking like rice. Pasta Alla Norma

Southwest 4 or 5, increasing 6 or 7, then veering northwest later, 4 or 5.

Slight, occasionally moderate.

Occasional rain.

Moderate or good, occasionally poor.

 

 

Yes, I know. I promised to write a “chicken (soup) for the soul” recipe, and I can assure you I will. I just encountered some hurdles and need more time.

Today`s recipe is more about a cooking technique than the actual recipe. To be perfectly honest I thought I have already written about it, but when I pointed a colleague at my blog to have a look at it, she said that it is not there. So here we go.

My colleague loves food and cooking but due to some circumstances, which can only happen in modern day Britain, she is without a flat. I wont get into a tirade how someone, who works full time, can end up in a hostel, just saying that she is in one. But has money to feed herself properly, albeit just one electric cooking plate. One! Mind you, she is well off, most hostels have only a microwave and there are still some people bleating that poor people should cook more.

Nevertheless, we discussed the simple problem of cooking pasta and I promised to write a recipe down for her. Which I did. Somehow it did not end here and the picture is lost, so this is my creation from today.

Many, many years ago I was at a “Food and Drink Exhibition” and the brilliant Valentina Harris gave a cookery  demonstration. She was very strict about the right way to cook pasta “The pasta must be in water as salty as the sea and it must surf on the rolling waves”. This is how I was taught it as well.

Turns out this is only partially right. If you ever wonder about any cookery technique, and if it holds up to a scientific test, look no further than seriouseats and the awe inspiring J. Kenji López-Alt (just noticed that seriouseats has today a feature on Sabich= well, you heard it here first!) He did the pasta test and I can only encourage you to read it here. 

Basically he says that, apart from thin long noodles, the big pot issue is nonsense. So I tried it out. Several times. And he is right.

So one day I was contemplating my favourite pasta dish, Pasta Alla Puttanesca (whore/slut/tart`s pasta) , and, since I had no spaghetti but only some kind of robust pasta, I thought: “why waste another pot. If you can cook pasta in very little water, you can also cook it in the sauce”. Encouraged by the fact that some already did it with big success I tried it out. And it worked like a dream. In fact it works so well that you don’t have to worry if your pasta is on the wrong side of “al dente”, try it and if it is undercooked, just add a bit more water to the sauce. The recipe I gave my colleague was my take on a “one pot Pasta Alla Puttanesca”, but today`s recipe is with my favourite ingredient, aubergine.

Pasta Alla Norma

You will notice that I salt the aubergines first. This is an old technique to get rid of the bitterness of aubergines. If you buy nowadays your aubergines at a supermarket they wont taste bitter anymore, this has been bred out in the last two decades. If you buy them from a farmer`s market, be always better safe than sorry. However: If you salt them before frying, they take up less oil. And boy, fried aubergines soak up (expensive) olive oil like a sponge. So, while this is an annoying time consuming step, do it for the sake of your waistline and purse.

A good handful of robust pasta (I used Capunti, but feel free to use any other similar shape)

1 jar of peeled whole tomatoes (I used Cosi Come Italian Red Datterini Tomatoes in Water 350g )

1 small aubergine, cut into 3 cm cubes

2 cloves garlic, peeled and finely chopped

1 shallot, finely chopped

About 8 tablespoons olive oil

1 tsp of dried oregano

1 pinch of dried chilli peppers (optional)

8 large basil leaves, torn in half

3 tsp of Mascarpone

Salt and freshly milled black pepper

Cut the aubergine into 3cm dice, sprinkle with salt and leave to drain in a colander for at least 1 hour. Wash the salt and juices away and pat dry.

Heat 6 tablespoons olive oil in a pan over medium heat until shimmering. Add as much aubergine as fits in a single layer.  Cook, shaking pan occasionally, and turn until the aubergine is well browned on both sides, about 5 minutes total. Transfer aubergine with a slotted spoon to a plate and set aside. Repeat with the rest of the aubergines if necessary (I did not need a second go). Once all the aubergines are cooked, pour the oil away, but leave a very small amount. Add the other 2 tbsp of olive oil and increase heat to medium-high. Heat until olive oil is shimmering. Add garlic, shallots, oregano and pepper flakes, and cook, stirring constantly, until fragrant but garlic is not browned, about 30 seconds to one minute.

Add the contents of your tin of tomatoes and mix. Add generously salt. Add all the pasta and fill the tin/jar with water and add to the mixture.

See the picture below how it should look.

Bring to a boil, reduce to a bare simmer and cook, stirring occasionally, until liquid is thickened into a sauce-like consistency, and the pasta is on the hard side of "al dente", about 10-13 minutes (depending on your shape).

Once the pasta is nearly cooked, add the fried aubergines and give it another 2 minutes.

Spoon onto a plate and top generously with the basil. Add the Mascarpone on top and add pepper.

Serve. Just before eating, mix the Mascarpone and the basil under the pasta and wait for a few seconds.

Enjoy with a glass of red wine.