CHIUCJEND RICE!

CHICKEN RICE!

It's hard to explain exactly how good chicken rice is except with one word: UMAMI

Chicken rice is one of the national dishes of Singapore. Often known as Hainan chicken, this dish represents the Hainanese majority of the population on the all-star roster of must-have dishes. And it is certainly acceptable to the most unadventurous palate. After all, chicken rice is only chicken rice. OOIR ISIT????!!?!?!

It looks so simple, nu? Boiled chicken, served almost ice-cold, atop a bed of rice and garnished with some cucumber and red pepper. So simple. But like all things Spanish, it is dangerous.

A whole chicken is boiled, then removed and put into a bucket of ice water. This separates the fat/skin from the meat and the chicken is then hung up until it is chopped into delicious bite sized pieces. But we need part B of the concoction, rice. The simplest of foods - but with a brilliant twist and shout. The rice is not simply cooked, it is cooked IN the chicken stock from its boiled counterpart. So simple.
Exhibit B.

Admire the succulence of not only the chicken but the rice. The rice. Which you could eat for days and days because what you see are grains swollen not with water but with pure UMAMI. I'm salivating as I write this. The dish is served with a kind of fish sauce reduction, a black-brown syrup, as well as a chili sauce. The chicken-rice + condiment 1,2 punch would floor Mike Tyson as quickly as he rocked Zach Galifianakis in The Hangover.

Rice is often left on the side, or used to balance out a foodstuff. But in this case, I just could not stop eating the rice. Helpless I was. The lure was too strong. And not only for me, but for this whole crowd as well.

Chicken rice. Ask me and I'll fed ex it to you.