Poached Chicken with Three Dipping Sauces

Ingredients:

4 ½ to 6 lbs whole chicken (the better your chicken, the better your flavor, since there isn’t a lot of extra going on in this recipe) – this chicken needs to be fully defrosted if frozen with no frozen bits.
5 slices of ginger
1 onion, or leek, or a few cloves of garlic (to flavor the water)
4 inches ginger root, peeled finely chopped (I use my mini food processor)
3 scallions, finely chopped
½ cup vegetable oil
¾ teaspoon salt
2 jalapenos, finely chopped (I use my mini food processor)
1 tablespoon sugar
¼ cup rice wine vinegar
5 scallions, finely chopped
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
¼ cup soy sauce (I prefer low sodium, Kikkoman green)

Instructions:

Serves 8.

Fill a large stockpot with water. The water should be at a level which will allow you to completely SUBMERGE your chicken underwater, with no problem. Bigger is better here. (I tried a smaller pot only to have to dump and start over in my bigger pot.) If in doubt, until you master this recipe, err with the bigger pot. You don’t want overflow of chicken water all over your kitchen. You can do a test run with your raw chicken, by submerging in water to see how much you need. Remove chicken before boiling water.

Cover your stockpot and bring water, ginger, and onion/leek/garlic to a boil. In the meanwhile, salt chicken liberally and give it a bit of a salt scrub. Rinse thoroughly and set aside, until water is fully boiling.

Once water is fully boiling, place chicken into the water, making sure that it is completely submerged in the water. Leave pot uncovered and bring chicken and water to another rolling boil again. While waiting it to boil again, you can skim off any scum off the surface of the water, if you intend to use the broth for rice porridge or something else. If you don’t want to use the broth for anything, go ahead and just wait for the chicken and water to boil again.

Once water is boiling, using tongs carefully lift chicken out of the water. You want to drain all the cavities of any lukewarmish water. While water is boiling, carefully re-submerge chicken into the water to fill all the cavities with hot boiling water. Cover pot with lid and TURN OFF stove. Do NOT remove lid of pot for the next 1 hour if your chicken is under 5 ¼ lbs, or the next 75 minutes if your chicken is over 5 ¼ lbs.

While your chicken is enjoying a nice soak in the hot water, begin making your 3 dipping sauces. For the ginger sauce, mix together finely chopped ginger, finely chopped scallions, oil and salt together in a bowl. Mix and set aside.

For the jalapeno sauce, mix together finely chopped jalapenos, sugar, and vinegar. Set aside.

For the scallion sauce, place chopped scallions in a bowl. Heat two tablespoons of oil in a small, fry pan or sauce pan. The oil should be hot enough that it shimmers or you can test by carefully putting one scallion piece in the oil to see if it sizzles. If the oil sizzles the scallion, then carefully pour the two tablespoons of oil over the scallions in the bowl and allow the scallions to be cooked by the oil. Add soy sauce and mix. Set aside.

Once the 60 minutes or 75 minutes of chicken cooking in water is up, uncover pot, and remove chicken from water and place in a bowl (in order to catch residual liquid). Allow chicken to cool enough so that you can handle it without screaming OUCH! Once chicken has cooled sufficiently (30 minutes or so), begin cutting chicken as you wish. I don’t like skin so I removed skin, cut of drumsticks, wings, and removed the meat from bones and roughly cut it into bite-sized, dippable pieces.

Serve chicken warm, room temp, or cold from fridge, with dipping sauces. Allow diners to dip however they please. Perfect with hot rice.

From weekofmenus.blogspot.com