Booth 52 at the food court in Penang’s Batu Lanchang Market is well known for its chicken rice casserole. Each order is prepared in a separate clay pot with a lid.When frosty weather envelops New York, one of my favorite comfort foods is claypot chicken rice. That’s a bit ironic, because I learned to make this one-pot meal in Penang, Malaysia, where I’ve gone numerous times to escape the worst of the East Coast winters. The weather there is hot and humid year-round, and in the coldest month averages around 82°F.
Penang also happens to be a foodie’s paradise. Malay, Chinese and Indian cuisines are well represented in tiny restaurants and food stalls. For advice about where to eat a particular street food, one can rely on leads from taxi drivers, hotel employees and members of the Penang Foodie Group on Facebook. It sometimes seems like everyone is a self-appointed food critic. The truly discerning don’t hesitate to queue up for 30 minutes at a favorite stall.
For claypot chicken rice, a traditional Chinese dish, mine is booth 52 at the food court in Penang’s Batu Lanchang Market. As with other similar vendors, you tell them whether you want a large or small portion, and what, if any, extras you like. Options include Chinese sausage, egg and dried salted fish. Each order is prepared in a separate clay pot with a lid.
This porous clay pot is critical to the cooking process, which involves slowly steaming the rice with other ingredients, infusing it, in this case, with the flavors of dark soy sauce and Chinese cooking wine. The cover and outside of the pot have a course texture, which explains why these are sometimes called “sandy pots.” The interior has a smooth glaze.
Street food vendors make the preparation of this casserole look easy. In what resembles a choreographed ballet, they handle six or more pots at a time, rotating them on various burners (sometimes fueled with charcoal) to vary the heat level. One might even get the impression that it’s the perfect meal for a busy weeknight.
That may be true, but only after considerable practice. It took some tinkering to adjust the recipe — and the technique — to my Western kitchen, especially given my fondness for preparing claypot chicken rice on a cold winter day.
My introduction to the process took place in a room that was at least 25 degrees warmer than mine was on Christmas Day. It belongs to Samuel Tham, a former restaurant chef with a vibrant business teaching tourists and foreign restaurateurs how to make some of Penang’s most iconic dishes. On each visit my husband, Ken, and I take a cooking lesson with him. Tham excels at making his subject accessible, and is generally encouraging about our prospects of replicating recipes back home.
With claypot chicken rice, he was only cautiously optimistic. “This one will be slightly challenging,” he warned me, as I stood at his kitchen counter assembling the ingredients. “The difference between an expert and an amateur is the heat level and the timing.”
“And what if I screw up?” I asked, already intimidated.
“You try again. You will have learned a lesson.”
As events unfolded, these words seem prescient.
Everything went fine under Chef Samuel’s watch. An important takeaway was like something out of a high school chemistry lesson: Each time you uncover the pot or add an ingredient, it brings down the temperature, so you must adjust the flame to make up for that fact.
Back home in New York, I had other issues.
One involved the quantity and quality of the chicken. Tham’s recipe called for four thighs. Those we bought together at the Batu Lanchang wet market were from a freshly slaughtered bird. The packaged ones sold at my local supermarket were larger and wetter, perhaps from water routinely added to make them appear plumper. So the first time I prepared the recipe, it contained proportionally too much poultry, and I had to cook it much longer to get the rice to the desired level of doneness. In subsequent iterations, I reduced the quantity of chicken, recording the weight that worked best.
The heat level, as Tham warned me, involved the biggest learning curve. But in the course of preparing the recipe numerous times, on my own gas stove, I grew comfortable with that, too.
The other thing I discovered was that one must treat the humble clay pot as if it were a piece of fine china. I bought a couple of them at Pots Kitchenware in Penang for less than $2 apiece, paid a fortune to ship them home by DHL and broke one after the second use.
My mistake was how I cleaned it. I knew not to use soap or to scrub. But to help remove the rice stuck to the bottom of the pot, I had poured boiling water into it — while it was sitting on a cold stone counter. Which caused it to crack.
“Ahh, usually I just pour in room temperature water to soak it for 30 mins or I pour in room temperature water and boil it,” Samuel texted when I shared the latest mishap.
Got it.
I recycled my precious souvenir as a planter (which looks great, by the way), and carefully followed the steps for seasoning my spare: soak it for 24 hours immersed in room-temperature water; let it dry for several days; rub the inside lightly with vegetable oil.
Knowing how sensitive these pots are to sudden changes in temperature, I am now especially careful in winter. Instead of taking it out of my cold kitchen cabinet and putting it directly on the stove, I let it adjust to room temperature first. And when I uncover the pot during the cooking process, I am careful not to rest the cover on the cold stone counter.
In the event of further casualties, I can order a replacement online for $14.95 (plus shipping) from the San Francisco–based company wokshop.com. Mine has a single handle and a thin wire cage on the outside. The cage protects the pot and helps conduct heat.
The following recipe, which uses a 24-ounce clay pot, is adapted for a Western winter kitchen. Based on trial by fire, and follow-up text exchanges with the ever-obliging Chef Samuel, it produces claypot chicken rice that rivals my favorite Penang stall.
THE BASICS
200 grams boneless, skinless chicken thighs, sliced into bite-size pieces
100 grams jasmine rice
120 grams of water (measure and set aside for use during the cooking process)
10 grams dried shrimp (or substitute slices of raw peeled, deveined shrimp)
1/2 Chinese sausage (chicken or pork) or one link of breakfast sausage, sliced
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1 egg at room temperature
1 capful of Chinese cooking wine
Fried shallots and chopped spring onion for garnish (optional)
Prepare the ingredients, in the order below, before you begin cooking.
MARINATE THE CHICKEN
10 grams ginger
1 teaspoon white pepper powder
1 teaspoon sugar
3/4 teaspoon oyster sauce
1 teaspoon dark Chinese soy sauce
1 teaspoon sesame oil
1 tablespoon light Chinese soy sauce
Finely grate the ginger. There’s no need to peel it first. Just lay a flat grater on top of a cutting board and grate until all that’s left is the skin. Throw away the skin. Lift the grater and scrape the ginger from the cutting board into a bowl.
Add the other marinade ingredients to the bowl, stir to combine, pour over the chicken and toss. Let it marinate for at least an hour or until the liquid is fully absorbed.
SOAK THE RICE
Rinse the rice under the tap until the water runs clear. Soak it covered in fresh water for at least 30 minutes. Then drain it completely before you begin to cook.
MIX THE SIZZLING SAUCE
Place a bowl on a kitchen scale and measure the following ingredients by adding them to the bowl in sequence:
15 grams oyster sauce
25 grams light soy sauce
1 teaspoon dark soy sauce
25 grams water
5 grams sesame oil
15 grams Chinese cooking wine
1 teaspoon sugar
Stir these ingredients together and set aside.
COOKING DIRECTIONS
- Preheat the clay pot on a medium flame until a droplet of water thrown into it sizzles. Be patient — clay pots heat slowly, especially in a cold climate. (Don’t be alarmed if the pot gives off smoke.)
- Add the oil, and then the shrimp and sausage to the pot. Sauté, stirring with a wooden spoon, for about one minute until it is fragrant.
- Add the rice. Turn the heat up high (because adding the rice has caused the temperature to drop). Stir very briefly, just until the rice is dried out.
- Add about half of the water you have premeasured to the pot. Bring it to a boil. Once it is boiling, turn the heat down to medium, cover it and simmer for one minute.
- Uncover, add the marinated chicken and the sizzling sauce. Give it one stir to incorporate the chicken and dislodge any rice that has so far stuck to the bottom. Put the cover back on and cook on a very low heat for 12 minutes. During this time do not remove the cover.
- After 12 minutes, check the rice for doneness. If it is still chewy, sprinkle on the rest of the water. (Do not stir.) You may like it al dente, but the Chinese cook it until soft. If it is, go to Step 8.
- Put the cover back on and continue cooking for another three minutes — again, without lifting the cover. Continue checking at 3-minute intervals until the rice is fully cooked.
- When the rice is done, crack the egg into the pot, cover and drizzle one capful of cooking wine around the lid. (This infuses the rice with wine flavor.) Turn the heat to medium and continue cooking for about one more minute, or a bit longer if you like your fried egg well-done. (You will hear the egg sizzling inside the pot.)
- Open the pot, sprinkle on the fried shallots and spring onion (if using) and serve.
Serves two.
Deborah L. Jacobs, a lawyer and journalist, is the author of Four Seasons in a Day: Travel, Transitions and Letting Go of the Place We Call Home and Estate Planning Smarts: A Practical, User-Friendly, Action-Oriented Guide. Join her on Facebook here. You can subscribe to future blog posts by using the sign-up box on her website’s homepage.
RELATED ARTICLES
Hunting Down Hearty Assam Laksa in Penang
Pandemic Drunken Noodles Take Edge Off Sobering News