Hainan Chicken Rice with Roast Chicken

Its been 4 months since my last blog. Hope I have not lost too many readers as I have sort of neglected this blog due to other interests I have discovered. However, I am still as interested in cooking and eating as ever. Just that I seem to have a bit less time to blog about them now. But anyway, here is an update on one of my favourite dishes.

Back in 2008, I wrote a comprehensive guide to how I cook Hainan Chicken Rice with lots of images. Sadly, the host have now taken all the pics down. One day, I will upload them again. But in the meantime, here is the link anyway. You will get the idea even if you just read the text.

Click here.

This blog basically is the same except that the chicken is actually roasted instead of poached.

Normally a chicken lasts 2 days for us. On the second day, I reheat the chicken in the microwave, let it cool a bit and then chop it. On this occassion, I decided to roast the chicken for the second day. This adds extra taste to it to compensate the loss of smooth texture as a result of reheating.

All I do is rub a mixture of dark soy, honey, 5 spice, salt and pepper to the dry cold chicken. Then let it dry at room temp for an hour. After that, put in a VERY hot oven, so that it cooks the surface quickly and not cook the inside for too long. After all , the chicken is already cooked.

These are the results.

Btw, I glazed the skin with its own fat dripping, but not too much to retain some form of crispiness. Commercially, the vendors would bathe the skin with hot oil to get an even golden brown colouring.

Museo del Jamon, Madrid, Spain

Back in June this year, we paid a fleeting visit to Madrid, the capital of Spain. We saw lots of memorable sights and ate some truly amazing food. One of the highlights was at this location, just around the corner from our hotel, near Puerto del Sol, the heart of the city - similar to Piccadilly Circus in London.

The Museo del Jamon (translated - museum of ham) is a chain of restaurants in Madrid and specialised in the obvious, but they were served mainly as starters, which we skipped. Yes, I know, it was like going to A&W and not having the root beer, but we noticed that their portions of main courses were really big and thought we did not have room for starters as well.


They sell ham by the joints and during the day, act as a market where people come in the droves to buy the ham which they are famous for. However, there is a bar downstairs and restaurant upstairs where punters would enjoy their wide variety of popular Spanish dishes. Standing while eating did not appear to be a problem for the Spanish, but we chose to go upstairs to the seating area.


All over the restaurant, there were joints of ham hung up on the wall for sale. Surprisingly, they did not smell at all.



We only had two dishes ... this roast half chicken with chips was the smallest portion they had. Dont let the bland looking chicken fool you - it had the best tasting and crispiest chicken skin I ever tasted! I do not know what they used to marinate this, but I have never tasted chicken like this anywhere else outside Spain. Seems like this is the normal way they do a roast chicken in Spain, as I have tasted similar chickens elsewhere in the city.


And the highlight of the meal was this crispy battered mixed seafood platter. It was huge and only cost about 12 euros. It consisted of prawns, whitebait, squid, some whitefsh chunks (cod?) and pink fish chunks (cant be salmon as they were too small - the chunks were half the fish). Dont let the blandness of the picture fool you - everything was so crispy that I ate the prawns whole, including the shell! And you could literally taste the freshness in the fishes - I have never tasted squid as tender as what was serverd here! I still dream of this dish today and if I am in Madrid again, this is the first place I would dine at!










Museo del Jamon
Carrera de San Jerónimo, 6
Madrid
nearest metro: Puerta del Sol