My Roast Chicken Singapore Style is essentially a jazzed traditional roast chicken. Quite often, when I’m asked for ideas on ways to make a regular roast chicken more exciting, this is the recipe I give people. It’s cooked in exactly the same way as you’d cook your usual roast, it’s just the spices and seasonings that are different. I often serve it with garlic and cumin roast potatoes and my usual gravy or even the spicy gravy.
The ingredients in this are just the usual that you find in South East Asian cuisine – lemongrass, galangal, et al.
Fish alternative
Use the exact same ingredients with 4 salmon fillets, marinate for 30 minutes, bake, covered, in 180˚C oven for 25 minutes.
Handy Hint
Always let your meat rest before carving up. 20 minutes should suffice, unless it’s a particularly large piece, then go for 30 minutes.
Why let your meat rest? During cooking, the juices will naturally get sucked up towards the surface of the meat, so if you cut straight after roasting, this surface juice is just going to seep out and get wasted on your chopping board, resulting in drier meat towards the middle. Resting allows these juices to get redistributed.
How to let your meat rest? Just cover it with foil, then a tea towel and leave in a warm place, which your kitchen ought to be if you’ve been roasting.
Galangal
This is usually the flavouring that most people outside of South East Asia and Latin America struggle with. My advice is to go ahead with the recipe without the galangal, you will still get a wonderful bird. Don’t even think about substituting it with ginger, there is no substitute for galangal.
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Roast Chicken Singapore style
- Prep Time: 20 minutes
- Cook Time: 1 hour 50 minutes
- Total Time: 2 hours 10 minutes
Description
Traditional roast chicken jazzed up with South East Asian spices like lemongrass and galangal.
Ingredients
- 1 whole chicken, about 1.8 kg (I usually buy organic or at the very least, a free range bird)
- 1 large onion, quartered
- 1 lemongrass, bruised
- 1 lime, halved (juice of half used in paste later)
- 4 kaffir lime leaves
- Grind to a paste
- 1 medium onion
- 4 cloves garlic
- 2 in/5 cm ginger
- 1 in/2 cm galangal or 1 tsp shop bought paste (omit if you can’t find it)
- 1 lemongrass
- half a red chilli (omit, if you don’t want the heat)
- juice of half a lime
Instructions
- Grind or pound all the required ingredients together.
- Rub the paste all over the chicken. Ease some of it carefully under the chicken skin, as far as you can go, being careful not to break the skin.
- Place the quartered onion, the lemongrass, the lime halves and leaves in the chicken’s cavity.
- Place the chicken on a roasting dish, cover with foil and leave aside for 30 minutes for the chicken to marinade slightly. Turn the oven on to 190˚C/170˚C Fan.
- Put the chicken in the oven and cook for 1 and a half hours, basting after an hour.
- Take the foil off for the last 20 minutes to brown the chicken.
- Let the chicken rest, covered with foil, followed by a tea towel for another 20 minutes before carving.
Nutrition
- Serving Size: 4-6
