Guest Post: Congee

Guest Author: Miss Neddy , Singaporean Tea Blogger Extraordinaire

I love a good congee, and usually a minced pork and century congee is my favourite. But being short of both pork and century eggs, I settled for making chicken congee instead. Congee is more commonly known as jok or chok, and is of Cantonese origin. Depending on how much time you have, you can spend a few hours making it, or just half an hour. It’s more common for breakfast, but given the amount of time I needed to make this, I’d have to have started last night. It is very much like chicken soup, very warming and easy to eat and digest. Make it thinner for when your tummy isn’t feeling too well, or thicker if you’re hungry. If you like umami, congee is chock full of meaty goodness, even if you use water instead of stock. Just remember not to skimp on the chicken slivers.

I used chicken bones, about 2 tablespoons of soya sauce, 2 small red onions and half a clove of garlic to make the stock. I would love to use some dried scallop as well, but ran out today, so to get the sweetness for the stock, I substituted with a roughly chopped carrot. If you like sweet potatoes, you can use them too, but take them out when they’re cooked and use them later to mix in with the congee. I did that with some chicken breast meat here; once I took the cooked meat out, I let them cool before tearing them into slivers. A slightly better way of doing this is to get the ribcage of a chicken, with the breast meat still attached; once the breast meat is cooked, take the chicken out, tear off the meat and chuck the bones back into the pot. This will give you lovely long strands of chicken, instead of the short chunky ones I had to settle for.

I cooked the stock for around 3 hours on medium heat, and soaked the rice in water for around 2 hours. Just as the ligaments of the chicken begin to soften, causing the bones to fall apart from one another, I took out all the solids from the stock and poured in the rice, turning the heat down to medium-low. This step doesn’t take long, but there’s quite a lot of intermittent stirring involved to stop the rice from burning at the bottom. After around 10 minutes, the rice will break down and the congee is formed. Time to stir in the chicken slivers. Wait another 10 minutes or so, and the congee is ready to eat. I cracked a fresh egg into a bowl and spooned the congee over it, and stirred slowly to mix the egg into the congee. One problem with using stock rather than water for making congee is that the congee has a slightly unappetizing yellow colour, instead of a glossy rice-white colour.

Congee thickens more as time passes, so I put aside 2 bowls of stock to water it down for later meals. Hot water is fine too. Just use a low heat to warm the congee back up and stir in the stock or water.