Roast Chicken Singapore style

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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