This is my first official recipe on this blog. It is a request from a good friend of mine. He loves the chicken rice because it is rich, fragment. This is a dish often served during special occasions in Vietnam, usually ancestor worship day every month. I want to write this recipe with no precise measurement, like Uncle Roger often says: "Use feeling".
Ingredients:
- Dried Jasmine rice
- Chicken broth
- Chicken fat
- Gingers (optional)
- Spring onions / Scallions (optional)
Directions:
- Make enough rice for how many people going to eat the rice. Put the dried Jasmine rice in a bowl, pot. Make sure it's a separate one from the rice cooker pot. The rice cooker pot usually has a non-stick surface, and we don't want that surface to be scratched up from washing rice.
- Wash the dried rice 3 times. The water doesn't have to be completely clear.
- Put the washed rice in the rice cooker pot. No water in the rice pot for now.
- Put enough chicken broth to cover the rice up to one finger joint. The chicken broth can be from canton or freshly made. For freshly made, boiling or steaming some chicken drumsticks gives you chicken broth, and meat as well to go with that rice.
- Add a teaspoon of chicken fat. Chicken fat is a bit harder to get. I usually render the fat from chicken thighs' skins beforehand. You wouldn't believe just how much fat there is in those thighs here in the US. That's industrial chickens for you, 4 quarters yield enough fat for me to use for two weeks.
- Add the aromatics. This one is optional. For today, I added some crushed gingers and spring onions.
- Cook the rice in the rice cooker normally.
- After 25 - 35 minutes, out comes the perfectly cooked chicken rice.
This recipe can be used to make delicious chicken sticky rice, too. We did that a lot in Vietnam.
Happy Thanksgiving, everybody.