Hainan Chicken Rice Might Just Be My Favorite Chicken Dish
Do you have a dish you love so much that you collect recipes for it? Something that you always want to eat, that always sounds good. So good that you look for different versions, noting their similarities and differences, trying them all to see which one you like best, which version is the ideal version for that day, for your energy level, for what you have in the fridge and pantry.
I have several gotta-cook-’em-all dishes, and they’re all chicken-and-rice-based: chicken adobo, Japanese-style chicken curry and, my current muse, Hainan chicken rice. Unlike adobo or curry, which essentially simmer away after a meager amount of prep, Hainan chicken rice can involve a lot of steps. None of them are difficult, but they can eat up an afternoon, making it the perfect thing for a winter weekend.
The yield is fantastic: perfect, succulent chicken that’s had an aromatic soak with ginger, scallions and garlic; soothing chicken soup; rice that’s been cooked in some of said soup with pandan leaves; and a sparkly ginger-scallion sauce. Hainan chicken rice is maybe my favorite chicken dish — nourishing but not heavy, comforting but not cloying. And the elements branch out into helpful leftovers. The rice becomes fried rice, of course; the chicken goes into any number of applications; the soup is stock for stew (or curry!); and the ginger-scallion sauce is tossed with noodles for a stellar lunch.
All of which is to say: I’m very excited to add Kevin Pang’s recipe to my collection.
Featured Recipe
Hainan Chicken Rice
Before we move on, I want to call out Genevieve Ko’s ginger scallion chicken and rice and Sue Li’s chicken and rice with scallion-ginger sauce as excellent Hainan chicken rice shortcuts. They both feature gently cooked chicken with fragrant rice and a ginger-scallion situation, but with total cook times that wouldn’t feel insane on a Wednesday.
I think part of the reason I love Hainan chicken rice so much is that it goes all in on ginger. The root’s assertive, sinus-clearing spice is extra appealing right now, what with winter wintering hard (and the common cold being all too, well, common). I’ve been buying huge, gnarly knuckles of it to add to everything I’ve been cooking. Let’s make like Astaire and keep dancing with ginger, yes?
This sheet-pan salmon dinner from Colu Henry uses two teaspoons of grated ginger to add even more sass to a garlicky, citrusy harissa mixture. The colors of this dish pop, too: the red of the sauce on the pink salmon, the golden yellow potatoes, the purple red onion wedges and the curled green stems of cilantro to finish.
(A quick note before I proceed: Many of these recipes call for grating ginger, which I almost never do, instead opting for as fine a chop as I can manage. Does that mean I end up with little crunchy, juicy pieces of ginger that should have melted into the dish? Yes, but I don’t mind that tiny kick of heat, and you might not either!)
Ginger plays so well with earthy, starchy flavors and ingredients. See: Ali Slagle’s vegan coconut-ginger black beans, Yewande Komolafe’s roasted squash with turmeric-ginger chickpeas and David Tanis’s spicy carrot-ginger soup. In all three, ginger — itself a pantry staple — teams up with other long-lasting items (canned beans, coconut milk, hard-skinned squash and a bag of carrots) to make really bright, lush dinners.
Would these spiced ginger shrimp with burst tomatoes, a Melissa Clark banger, be better with in-season Sungolds? Probably, but since the tiny tomatoes are simmered with garam masala, ginger, garlic and scallions until they collapse and become one with the butter you add later, I’d argue that the cherry tomatoes at the store right now will do nicely.
To finish: Fresh ginger cake, of course. David Lebovitz’s recipe, which Amanda Hesser adapted for The Times in 1999, calls for a quarter-pound (!) of fresh ginger. Spiced even further with cinnamon, cloves and black pepper, it’s the sort of cake that gets even better the day or so after you bake it, its assertive flavors smoothing out over time, ready for afternoon snacking or late-night nibbles.
