All café dishes › Rice plates and baked rice
Baked Portuguese chicken rice
焗葡國雞飯
“A plate of rice and a bowl of soup. Eat first, work after.”
Ingredientsserves 4
街市Chicken egg (hard-boiled)· hard-boiled and quartered for the top, the Macanese garnish; a few black olives if you like2
Equipment
- A shallow baking dish, about 25 × 18 cm, one dish for four
Method
- Marinate the chicken twenty minutes in the soy, a teaspoon of sugar, the wine, the cornflour and a teaspoon of turmeric.
- Heat two tablespoons of oil, fry the garlic and shallot until fragrant, then the onion until soft. Add the tablespoon of turmeric and the curry powder and fry thirty seconds in the oil so they lose their raw dust. The Macanese original is turmeric and coconut with no curry powder; the Hong Kong café version adds it and is yellower and hotter, and this page follows the café.
- Add the chicken and turn it until it is yellow and sealed. Add the potato, carrot, stock, bay leaves, salt and the teaspoon of sugar; lid on and simmer fifteen minutes until the potato is nearly soft.
- Add the coconut milk and the milk and simmer five minutes uncovered. The sauce should be a thin yellow gravy, not a thick curry; it thickens in the oven. Taste for salt.
- Spread the rice in the dish, pour the chicken and sauce over, arrange the egg quarters, scatter the cheese or coconut. The café keeps the yellow coconut sauce as a bucket, poaches the chicken separately, pre-boils the potato, assembles on a plate of fried rice and browns it under the salamander in minutes; the home braises chicken and potato together in the sauce, slower, more flavoured, and the leftovers reheat as a curry over plain rice the next day.
- Bake at 200 °C for fifteen to twenty minutes until the top is spotted brown. A domestic oven browns unevenly: put the dish on the top shelf and turn it once. Rest five minutes.
- No oven: the braise poured over plain rice is Portuguese chicken rice without the bake, and nobody at home will complain. The chicken is done when there is no pink at the bone and the juices run clear.
Take care
- Contains soy and wheat (soy sauce), milk (milk or evaporated milk, cheese) and egg (the garnish). Chicken cooked through: no pink at the bone, juices clear. Tinned coconut milk once opened goes into the fridge and is used within two days.
The story
Portuguese chicken is Macanese, from the Portuguese, Chinese and Goan kitchen of Macau, and it has no original in Portugal; Hong Kong took it across the water in the 1960s and set it beside the baked pork chop as the other baked rice. The yellow sauce is the tell of a café that also makes baked vegetables and fish fillet in the same sauce.
Same counter
Lo Fo Tong is cultural food-heritage reference, not medical advice. If you are pregnant, unwell or on medication, talk to your doctor or registered practitioner before changing what is in the pot.