Chinese Soy Sauce Chicken Galantine

One of the things I really enjoy about CharcutePalooza is learning to make new things while at the same time trying to figure out how to incorporate something familiar into each challenge.  That point of reference could be a flavor, a texture, an aroma, an ingredient, or a technique.  For the October CharcutePalooza, galantine, I drew from Chinese BBQ: soy sauce chicken and cold poached chicken with ginger-scallion oil.

Keeping with the Chinese influence, I decided to use the Chinese holy trinity of ginger, scallion, and garlic for the aromatics and shiitake mushrooms and wood ear fungus for the garnish.

When it came time to make the galantine, some parts were easier than others.  Thanks the previous challenges, producing the forcemeat was a breeze.  I was worried about skinning the chicken, though, as the recipe calls for keeping the skin in one piece.  However, it was surprisingly easier than I thought.  The only part I struggled with was separating the end of the drumsticks from the skin by pulling the drumsticks through “as if you were removing a tight shirt.”

Up until the point where I had the chicken breast laid out on top of the forcemeat, I was pretty confident that I’d be able to finish up this challenge without a hitch.  I was wrong.

Rolling the galantine into an even cylinder proved to be extremely difficult for me.  After a few tries, the best I could muster was a galantine shaped more like one of the Michelin Man’s appendages or Lumpy Space Princess.  I was afraid if I didn’t tie the support strings tight enough the forcemeat would spill out.

In order to make the galantine a true Chinese soy sauce chicken galantine, I poached it in the mother sauce I created about a year ago when I made my first soy sauce chicken.  The mother sauce is a combination of soy sauce, chicken stock, rock sugar, ginger, scallion, garlic, cinnamon, and star anise.  Each time it’s used to poach something, fresh aromatics are added and the meat being poached deepens the flavor of the liquid.  The soy sauce gave the skin that distinct brown hue that comes with every soy sauce chicken.

Yes, the galantine looked like a piece of poop as a whole, but when sliced it was hard to tell.  Although the slices did come out a bit oblong, the flavors and textures were spot on.  The wood ear fungus provided crunchiness and the shiitake provided a little more meatiness to the soft forcemeat.  As is traditional in Chinese cuisine, I garnished the cold chicken galantine with ginger-scallion oil which was a nice refreshing contrast to the dark flavors imparted by the mother sauce.  Overall, the dish was new yet familiar at the same time.  Overlooking the failure to roll the galantine perfectly, I felt pretty good about how this month’s challenge ended up.

 

Ginger-Scallion Oil

Via my recipe previously posted here

Chinese Mother Sauce (makes about 2 kg)

Mise En Place

1. 1 kg chicken stock or water
2. 0.5 kg soy sauce
3. 0.5 dark soy sauce
4. 100 g vermouth
5. 100 g ginger, sliced and smashed
6. 100 g scallion, roughly chopped
7. 100 g garlic, smashed
8. 100 g rock sugar
9. 10 g black peppercorn
10. 2 star anise
11. 1 cinnamon stick

Method

1. Simmer for 2-3 hours, tasting every now and then and adjusting accordingly
2. Strain

Galantine Forcemeat Aromatics

Mise En Place

1. 18 g ginger, minced
2. 18 g scallion, minced
3. 18 g garlic, minced

Galantine Forcemeat Garnish

Mise En Place

1. 20 g dried shiitake mushrooms, soaked in warm water for 30 minutes
2. 20 g dried wood ear fungus, soaked in warm water for 30 minutes

Banh Bot Chien: Vietnamese Fried Rice Flour Cake With Pancetta

I may be in the minority here when I say this, but I don’t like bacon as much as most other people do.  I don’t swoon over it, and I’m envious when I hear someone exclaim “everything’s better with bacon!” because I wish I enjoyed something so much that it made whatever I was eating instantly better.  As an outsider looking in, bacon is the MSG of meats.

It should come as no surprise then that I’ve always preferred my breakfast eggs with sausage because I enjoy the spices typically found in breakfast sausages.  Bacon always seemed like a crunchy strip of salt to me.  So when I learned that the second CharcutePalooza challenge would be pancetta, a cousin of bacon, I was somewhat deflated.  However, I saw this as a chance to give salt cured pork belly a shot at winning me over as my preferred egg accompaniment.  Immediately, I knew the egg dish that I wanted to make: bot chien, or Vietnamese fried rice flour cake.  This wouldn’t be the first time I’ve used an Italian ingredient for a Vietnamese dish.

Bot chien is by far my favorite savory egg dish.  Sadly, I was only introduced to it a few years ago at Tan Tan Restaurant in Houston.  The first time I had bot chien, I loved it so much that I angrily asked my mom why we never ordered it in the past or why she’d never made it at home.  According to her, bot chien is a rarity in the States and to some extent Vietnam.  She reminisces about having to hunt down bot chien vendors in dingy back alleys of Saigon for an afterschool snack.

Essentially, bot chien consists of fried rectangular pieces of steamed rice flour cake bound together by eggs and topped with fried shallots, dried radish, and raw scallion.  It’s served with a side of soy sauce mixed with vinegar for dipping to which I usually add some Sriracha, sambal oelek, pickled pepper, or old dry mom sauce to (David Chang recently declared old dry mom sauce as the best sauce on No Reservations, and I couldn’t agree more).  The resulting bite is a symphony of texture and flavor.

You get sweet and sour from the dried radish, salty and sour from the dipping sauce, sweet from the fried shallots, savory from the egg, bright and pungent from the raw scallion, and spicy from the hot sauce or pickled peppers if you’re so inclined.  If that wasn’t enough to seal the deal, you get crispy from the fried rice cake and fried shallots, crunchy from the dried radish, spongy from the egg, and slightly chewy from the inside of the rice cake.

I thought it would be worth mentioning that I used black radish and pickled them with some carrot in place of dried radish.  I saw black radishes at the market and had never used them before, so I thought I’d give them a whirl.  They turned out to be very similar to daikon in flavor and got the job done well.

The process of making the CharcutePalooza meat of the month was again very simple and straightforward: salt and season, wait a while, rinse, hang, wait a while, enjoy.  One thing that I found funny was the presence of nipples on my pork belly.  I’ve worked with pork belly many times in the past, but only noticed the nipples this time.  However, upon closer inspection, it looks like the pork belly I used for thit kho also had nipples.

My spare bathroom paired with a humidifier was once again used as the meat hanging area.  Due to unforeseen time constraints, I decided to make the flat version of pancetta as the time required to hang is considerably less than that of rolled pancetta.

For my bot chien, I substituted the crispy fried shallots with crispy fried lardons of pancetta.  The rendered fat from the lardons was used to fry the rice cake and eggs and added an extra layer of flavor.  As for the actual pancetta, I could distinctly taste the garlic, thyme, bay leaf, and pepper that went into the cure.  This wasn’t simply a piece of salt disguised as meat like I was accustomed to.

Overall, I would say the pancetta itself and the bot chien with crispy fried pancetta were both great successes.  The pancetta turned out much better than I expected.  It’s climbed up to the number 2 spot on my breakfast meat list and bumped up bacon’s spot in the process as well.  Thanks to CharcutePalooza, I see nothing but a bright future with pancetta in my life.

Steamed Rice Flour Cake

Mise En Place (makes enough for at about 4 bot chien)

• 113 g rice flour
• 25 g tapioca starch
• 1 Tbsp. oil
• 414 g (1.75 C) water
• 2 g salt
• 2 g sugar

Method

1. Mix all ingredients and place into a heatproof vessel such that the depth of the slurry is about half an inch.
2. Steam over medium heat until a toothpick comes out clean, about 45 minutes.
3. Let the cake cool and firm up.

Banh Bot Chien

Mise En Place

• 100 g steamed rice flour cake cut into 1 inch by 2 inch rectangles
• 55 g pancetta lardons
• 3 large eggs, beaten
• Handful of diced scallion
• Your favorite pickled condiment
• Soy sauce
• Vinegar
• Your favorite hot sauce (optional)

Method

1. Crisp lardons in a pan over medium-low heat.  Set aside, leaving the rendered fat in the pan.
2. Fry both sides of the rice cake over medium-high heat until golden brown.
3. Add eggs to the pan, agitating slightly to distribute the egg.
4. Flip the bot chien once the bottom has coagulated enough.
5. Plate the bot chien and garnish with the pancetta lardons, scallion, and your favorite pickled condiment.
6. For the dipping sauce, mix soy sauce, vinegar, and hot sauce (optional) to taste.

Chinese Poached Chicken With Ginger-Scallion Oil

From time to time, my mom would make a no-frills poached chicken that we’d eat simply with some fish sauce or salt and pepper.  She used what I now know as the “Chinese” way to poach a chicken: bring a pot of water to just under a boil, stick a whole chicken in the pot, take the pot off the heat, and let it sit for about an hour.  Plain poached chicken may not sound very appealing, but the gentle Chinese method of poaching results in a super moist and tender chicken.

Later in life when my family moved to Chicago, we discovered the joy of Chinese poached chicken served with ginger-scallion oil (very much like what you would eat with Chinese whole steamed fish) at a random hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant.  Chinese poached chicken is good on it’s own, but with ginger-scallion oil it’s elevated to a level worthy of addiction.

It’s no surprise that ginger-scallion oil is a perfect condiment to almost anything since it’s made up of two out of the three ingredients for the Chinese holy trinity: ginger, scallion, and garlic.  Knowing I was one ingredient away from completing the trifecta, I saw some fresh garlic at Marketplace on Oakton and decided to incorporate the green stalks into my ginger-scallion oil.

I chose to use the less pungent stalks of the fresh garlic rather than the bulbs that most people are familiar with because I didn’t want a strong garlic flavor to overwhelm the delicateness of the chicken.  Plus, I’d never used fresh garlic stalks before so I thought it would be an interesting experiment.  Under the knife, the stalks felt like a sturdy scallion as they were a bit denser than their Allium cousin.  Clearly I took a more rustic approach as the pieces of garlic stalk were cut unevenly in some places.

I ended up using the garlic bulbs (and some homemade berbere) for some yemisir watt that I made later in the week.

 

From a distance, the fresh garlic stalks are somewhat indistinguishable from the scallion.

The intensely aromatic mixture, sauce, oil, or what have you can be paired with pretty much anything and instantly make it taste amazing.  In fact, I’d be perfectly content with eating plain white rice topped with ginger-scallion oil for a meal.  However, I thankfully had chicken on hand.  Instead of poaching the chicken in water, I used some homemade chicken stock for some extra flavor and cooked rice with the resulting liquid.

The ratios listed below are by no means strict.  Just go what with what fits your tastes and use common sense when it comes to how much oil to use.

Chinese poached chicken

1. Pot of water or stock => just under a boil
2. Whole chicken => into pot, take pot off heat, ~1 hour

Ginger-scallion oil

1. Equal parts ginger and scallion => mince
2. Hot pan => neutral oil, just under smoke point
3. Step #1 => into pan, ~1 minute, stir constantly