Vietnamese Roast Chicken and Sticky Rice Upgrade
it's done in 30 minutes, including soaking time
Hello there!
Here’s hoping you’ve had a good week and perhaps, a fabulous Thanksgiving feast too! Mitchell reported that the sticky rice, shiitake and chestnut dressing was awesome with and add-on of BS (Brussels sprouts!). We strategized on it in the dressing recipe comments, if you want to follow Mitch’s lead.
Today’s Sunday Special recipe resulted from me (1) being obsessive about this new easy breezy sticky rice cooking method, (2) wanting you to have another way to use sticky rice (let’s avoid single use ingredients!), and (3) having Thanksgiving leftovers.
So, let’s focus on a fun sticky rice recipe that you can make any time of year!
I’m hoping to persuade you to make my 30-minute Viet Roast Chicken Sticky Rice — Xôi Gà Rô Ti, which is pronounced this way:
Xôi = steamed sticky rice, Gà = chicken, Rô Ti = roasted
If you’re a French speaker, you may recognize rô ti to simply be the same as the French term rôti, which means roasted. In the Viet repertoire, the term generally denotes oven roasting — traditionally a luxe method of cooking because few cooks had ovens. In my family gà rô ti signaled roasting chicken with garlic and Maggi Seasoning sauce, which the French introduced and the Vietnamese embraced. (Here’s a Maggi primer at my website.) If you could had both an oven and Maggi, you were leading the good life, living large, part of the cosmopolitan class.
Here in America, where chicken was more affordable than in Vietnam, my family regularly ate Maggi-inflected gà rô ti for dinner. Leftovers found their way into banh mi sandwiches and became a topping for this sticky rice garnished with scallion oil and once in a while, fried shallots.
Sticky rice is naturally sweet, the chicken is salty umami, the scallion oil is fatty. I dreamt of xôi gà rô ti when I was a kid and relish it nowadays.
In Saigon, there are xôi gà rô ti street stalls such as this one, which stays busy by word of mouth and over 30 years of being in business. If you look at that Viet-language article, the chicken isn’t roasted. It looks like it’s boiled, then perhaps deep fried? I’m unsure.
Viet expats abroad oven roast. At Little Saigon banh mi shops, xôi gà rô ti is often sold on styrofoam trays, but the chicken is tired or too sweet. It’s never as good as homemade.
But the problem is this: Who wants to soak sticky rice for hours and then get the Chinese steamer out for a simple snack featuring repurposed leftovers? Not me.
But since I started playing with microwaving the grains, my sticky rice game has gotten significantly better. For instance, I can whip up this roast chicken (or turkey!) sticky rice snack in 30 minutes flat. No long soaking required. No Chinese steamer needed.
This new method and recipe takes less time than going to Little Saigon and costs less than a flight to Vietnam. ;-)
This dispatch includes the full text recipe, downloadable PDF, plus all my recipe ingredient and technical pointers, plus tweaks (yes, there are vegan possibilities, too!).