文昌鷄飯 WenChang Ji Fan - Chicken Rice from WenChang, HaiNan

What are the Hainaese famous for? Their chicken rice! The dish which I am going to make is called WenChang Ji fan 文昌鷄飯. In the old days, Chinese people would eat chicken only on feast days and people in Hainan would eat WenChang Ji Fan and the rice would had been rolled into rice balls, which we would call as fantuan 飯糰. 

So for those people out there, fantuan is not only eaten in Japan, but people in Hainan have been eaten fantuan for millennia. 

On Sunday is our high feast day. Fr Alan said that in England, August 15 would had been our High Summer Feast day and people would had partied on the streets, but this was terminated after the Reformation by the puritans. 

However, this high summer feast day has been transferred to Sunday 14 August 2016, by the Church in England, because our bishops have very low expectations of the faithful and they have assumed the faithful would not go to church to celebrate this high feast day on Monday after going to Mass on Sunday.

So on this high feast day, it will be most appropriate to make this WenChang Ji Fan for lunch. 

WenChang Ji fan 文昌鷄飯

On that morning, Daniel the seminarian, will be coming for a cooking lesson to learn to make Guo'tie 鍋貼.

Guo'tie 鍋貼

At lunch time, Ola will be coming to eat and she will be bringing her daddy too.  Michelle and Tabi will be coming for tea at 4 pm. So there will be lots of feasting on this summer high feast day. 

Some notes: WenChang Ji Fan - WenChang is a city in HaiNan Island in China; Ji means chicken and Fan means rice - so it could be translated as WenChang chicken rice. In places like Singapore and Malaysia, it is called as HaiNan Ji Fan or HaiNan chicken rice. 

WenChang Ji 文昌鷄

However, I am not able to go to WenChang City to buy a fresh chicken and I will not be making the rice balls either.

Instead, I have purchased an Oakham chicken from Marks and Spencers and I am going to use Sella rice. People outside China would normally use Thai fragrant rice to make this WenChang Ji Fan, but I like sella rice because nutritionally it is as good as eating brown rice. Furthermore, sella rice absorbs more liquid stock than other types of rice, twice as much as Thai fragrant rice and this means the rice is tastier after absorbing so much stock. 

In my humble opinion, I reckon Marks and Spencers' Oakham chicken is the best chicken one can buy in the UK. It has lots of meat, full of flavour and if one were to cook the chicken properly, the meat can be juicy and succulent. Oakham chickens have not been injected with antibiotics or growth hormone. I know Marks and Spencers will make sure their chickens are reared in the best of conditions and fed with the best natural food. In addition, Oakham chicken is a slow growing chicken and it lives 50 percent longer than chicken one buys from Waitrose. 

In my other post, I have already explained that I would not buy huge chickens which Marks sells, and the maximum size I would buy is 1.5 kg. And so I have bought a 1.5 kg Oakham chicken. 

Another good thing about Oakham chicken is that is comes pre-washed and ready to cook. Therefore I have to do very little to the chicken.

I first measure out 3 cups [rice cups] of sella rice which has a volume of 500 ml or a weight of 450 grams or 16 ozs. I soak the rice for 24 hours in salted cold water and refrigerate the soaked rice overnight. 

In a very large cooking pot, I will bring 3 litres of water to boil, and add slices of ginger, an onion, a few black whole peppercorns. When the water is boiling, I will slowly lower the chicken into the water. I will boil the chicken rapidly for 10 - 12 minutes and turn off the heat at the end of the cooking time, cover the pot with a lid and drape a blanket of towel over the pot to keep in the heat. I will let the chicken sit in the hot boiling liquid for 60 minutes. At the end of the hour, I will remove the chicken and place it on a large plate. I will rub Himalayan salt on the chicken and also with sesame oil.  This chicken is also called BaiQieJi 白切鷄 and Teochew people call this chicken bêh zam goi 白斬鷄.

Note: 12 minutes boiling time for a well done chicken and 10 minutes for a perfect chicken which have bones which are still red. 

The rice is the piece de resistance of WenChang Ji Fan, and like paella, the rice is the most important aspect of this dish. Therefore it is important that the rice is separated, cooked [not soggy nor undercooked] and fragrant. In SouthEast Asia, people could add pandan leaves into the rice. However, the original dish does not have pandan leaves when made in WenChang, HaiNan, China. 

After soaking the rice for 24 hours, I will rinse it with very cold water and drain the rice for 20 minutes using a colander, and one has to be very careful not to break the rice grains in the washing process. 

To prepare the stock, I would debone the cooked chicken after it has cooled for 45 minutes and return the bones to the stock. I would then simmer the bones in the stock for an hour. 

To prepare the stock for cooking the rice, I would prepare just under 1 litre of chicken stock - adding a Kallo organic chicken stock cube, 1 tsp Himalayan salt to the stock and bring this to a simmer.

I will then sauté minced ginger, garlic with 2 tbsp of shallots flavoured oil and then sauté the rice grains and make sure the grains are coated with oil, garlic and ginger. I will then place this rice into a rice cooker pot and add the prepared boiling stock and let the rice cooker do the rest of the cooking. As soon as the rice cooker finishes cooking the rice, I would fluff up the rice, switch off the rice cooker and the rice can sit in the rice cooker for up to half an hour or until the guests arrive.

Note: If you were to use Thai fragrant rice, and you were to wash the rice, then you should use the same volume of stock to the rice. You would also need to soak the rice grains for 20 minutes, then drain the rice and let it stand in a colander for 20 minutes. So if you were to use 500 grams of Thai fragrant rice, you would use 500 ml of prepared stock. 

I will serve the rice with sliced cucumbers and tomatoes on the side and place some chicken pieces on the side of the plate. WenChang Ji Fan is eaten with minced ginger sauce traditionally in WenChang but one could eat it with the Cantonese minced ginger and spring onion sauce, which is called JiangRong 薑蓉.  The people in SouthEast Asia eat this chicken rice dish with homemade chilli sauce, which is made from chillies, garlic, ginger and lime juice. 



However, as my guests are Europeans, and I have a hunch that the Cantonese jiang'rong would not be suitable for their taste, I have decided to modify the Teochew diam'zio 甜醬. I make Teochew diam'zio by mixing soya sauce and plum sauce and for this sauce, I add the juice of half a freshly squeezed lime. 



For dessert, I am going to serve marble kungen with chocolate sauce.



Daniel and I are going make guotie 鍋貼  and we will serve these to the guests as well. 



When Michelle and Tabi arrive for tea at 4 pm, they will be served orange chiffon cake.



One aspect of the WenChang Ji Fan which I have not discussed is the use of fried shallots to garnish the rice.   One aspect of cooking Indian pulao rice and biryani is the use of fried shallots to garnish these dishes. I think fried shallots would go very well with WenChang Ji Fan.  Daniel particularly likes scattering fried shallots on his rice. The question is would he scatter fried shallots on his paella?