Glutinous rice with chicken

I've been meaning to post about the glutinous rice with chicken meal I made a while ago. Today I saw a community called Food & Culture run by @akipponn, and figured this would be the perfect home for my post.

Culture background

Glutinous rice chicken or lo mai gai can normally be found on the dim sum menu at Chinese restaurants. Dim sum is a big part of Cantonese culture, particularly in Hong Kong. You can think of dim sum as Spanish tapas, little plates of food. That's why you normally have dim sum at a restaurant. It's normally eaten as breakfast particularly the elders who like to meet up with friends, or lunch gathering, but very rarely for dinner. Having dim sum is a great way to gather with friends and family and enjoy great food. I wrote this post about a dim sum meal I had with my family last Christmas.

Food background

Lo mai is glutinous rice, gai is chicken, and this is wrapped in a lotus leaf and steamed. If you're a vegetarian, don't run away yet, because I will tell you how you can make a plant based version.

These are the ingredients I used to make my lo mai gai. Glutinous rice and chicken on the left. You can use any part of the chicken meat you like. Then we have dried scallops in the jar, dried mushrooms below it, both are Chinese delicacy and have an intense flavour. The packet below is Chinese preserved sausage. And finally I have some dried lotus leaves on the right to wrap the filling. For a vegetarian version, you can replace the chicken with chestnuts, bamboo shoots, porcini, hard tofu or anything that doesn't mush easily.

First I deboned and deskinned the chicken, and cut it into bite size cubes. Then I marinated them. I rehydrated the scallops and dried mushrooms, kept the water from rehydration, and cut them in bite size as well.

I soaked 400g of rice for a couple of hours then lined them on a piece of cloth and steamed it for an hour to par cook it.

The lotus leaves were a little difficult to rehydrate as they are very big and brittle. I had to slowly submerge it in a bowl of warm water taking care they don't break. Once they were soft enough I gently folded them and let them soak a little longer.

I steamed the Chinese sausage and sliced them into six pieces. Then I cooked the chicken and dried scallops and mushroom, using the water I saved to make a heavy gravy. This is essential so the gravy doesn't leak later on.

You can see the texture is quite gooey here.

And finally I added two tablespoons each of oil, oyster sauce and light soy sauce to 100ml of water. I mix this into the glutinous rice to make it less sticky, and add some flavour and colouring to it.

And that's all the food preparation done. It takes a while, but I enjoy making my own food.

Now comes the fun part, wrapping the filling in the lotus leaf. Each lotus leaf is very large. I cut it into two halves and also cut off the centre hard bit.

First, I put a layer of rice on the leaf. It's a little messy as the rice keeps on sticking on my hand. Next I scope some chicken filling in top. Since it's quite gooey, it sits on top nicely.

Then I added another layer of rice in top. After a few attempts I found it was much easier to mould the rice in a plastic bag and I could just slap it neatly on top.

And finally I wrap it up in a little parcel. I double wrapped it using the othe half of the lotus leaf. This is to make sure the leaf doesn't break and it intensifies the aroma.

I ended with 4 lo mai gai with my 400g of rice. Each one was quite heavy and is a full meal in itself. You can make mini ones as well, just put less filling inside. That's what restaurants normally serve as people order a lot of different dim sum, and you don't want each dim sum to be too filling.

All the filling is already cooked, I only need to steam them for 30 minutes again. This is enough time for the lotus leaf aroma to gently infuse into the rice from the outside, and for the thick gravy from the filling inside to flavor the rice.

As I unwrap the piping hot lo mai gai, it lay there like a little baby cushioned by the lotus leaf. The aroma gently wafted out, it was so inviting. And it tasted so good.