Poached chicken with warm ginger sauce

Finally bought my first Chinese cookbook. Wells, actually it's a book on Chinese food written in English by none other than our very celebrity chef, Sam Leong. When I saw his first book titled A Wok Through Time, I wanted buy it but did not after some deliberations as I realized that those recipes are too difficult and time consuming for a regular home cook. However, A Taste of Home seems perfect for me and this is the recipe that calls out to me. I decided to change it a little by adding garlic to the chicken to make it more flavorful and adding chicken stock to the sauce to make it less oily.

Poached Chicken with Warm Ginger Sauce (adapted from Sam Leong's recipe) serves 4

For the Chicken
1 Chicken (~1.5kg)
2 slices of ginger
1 spring onion
8 cloves of garlic
1 tsp salt
1 tsp sugar

For the ginger sauce
1 tbsp corn oil
100g ginger peeled and minced - I used a food processor as I was too lazy to chop it up
100g spring onion white part only, minced
1 tbsp sesame oil
1 tbsp Chinese cooking wine (Hua tiao)
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp sugar
1/2 cup chicken stock / water from cooking chicken

Buy the freshest and most beautiful bird you can find. Rinse it and drain well.

Bring a large pot of water to boil over medium heat and add the ginger, spring onion, garlic, salt and sugar. Add the chicken and cook for 10 minutes over medium heat. Reduce heat to low and let chicken cook gently for 10 minutes.

Lift chicken up using a pair of chopsticks to drain the water from the chicken back to the pot. Return the chicken to the pot and continue cooking over low heat for another 15 minutes.

Remove the chicken and drain it. Soak the whole bird in cold water for 20 minutes until it is cooled. Drain the chicken, debone & chop it up.

While waiting for the chicken to cool, cook rice using the water from cooking the chicken. This imparts a nice subtle fragrance to the rice and is not oily like the regular chicken rice.

At the same time, prepare the ginger sauce. Heat 1 tsp of corn oil in wok over low heat. Add spring onion and ginger and stir fly till fragrant. Add remaining ingredients and mix well

Ladle warm ginger sauce over chicken and serve.

This makes a yummy, succulent chicken and all it needs is a kick-ass chili sauce. Of note, the chicken stock can be made by adding some chicken bones and the carcass into the water that was used to cook the chicken