Malacca Chicken Rice Balls

If any of you have been to the city of Malacca, i'm sure you have eaten their authentic and famous chicken rice balls. If you have not, then you must try it the next time when you 're there. It is one of the many unique specialties found in this historical town. Malacca is actually not very far from Kuala Lumpur, the capital city of Malaysia. It  takes about 2 hrs drive from there to get to Malacca and is one of the more popular tourist destination in Malaysia.  In 2008, Malacca , together with Georgetown were added to the list of Unesco World Heritage Sites. Both these cities are rich in history and multicultural heritage, you can visit this site and this too to know more.

As the name implies, these chicken rice are shaped into balls, roughly about the size of a ping pong ball, served with tender chicken in soya sauce and sesame oil and not forgetting the dipping hot chilli sauce.The chicken rice which we can also call garlic rice are usually cooked in chicken stock, garlic and onions. I got this method of cooking the garlic rice from a relative of mine, if you want it to be more tasty, you can add in some chicken seasoning powder if you wish which i did. There are also some who use margarine or butter to cook this chicken rice, it really depends on the taste that you really like. There's also another recipe here of cooking the garlic rice from Leny from Dine with Leny, she just cooked that couple of weeks back, slightly different from mine but i'm sure it taste good as well. Do visit her blog, she has got some nice recipes there.


the original ones look more compact, look at the picture below, which are believed done by machines.Chicken stock
Bring a pot of water ( enough to cover the whole chicken) to a boil. Put in the whole chicken and bring to another boil. Turn to lowest level of heat and let chicken soak in the pot for 25-30minutes. Do not cover the pot otherwise the skin of the chicken may tear apart. You can add some 1-2 tbsp chicken seasoning powder to the chicken stock. When chicken is cooked, bring the chicken out and rinse with cold water. Leave to cool before cutting into pieces.

The chicken stock here will be used for cooking rice, for soya sauce and also for dipping sauce. Any balance of the chicken stock can be used for making soups.

Garlic Rice
6-8 pips of garlic, finely chopped
5 small onions, finely chopped
6 tbsps of cooking oil
1 tsp salt
350gm rice

Method:
1.Saute the garlic and onions in the cooking oil till fragrant and slightly brown. Turn off heat and pour that into a bowl.
2. Put in rice in the rice cooker and pour in the chicken stock up to the slightly less than 2cm above rice level. Add in 3 tbsp of (1) and salt into the stock and stir to mix with the rice. Press on to cook rice.
3. When rice is cooked,  take a sufficent amount of rice to shape into balls while it's still hot.

Soya Sauce
4tbsp chicken stock
4tbsp light soya sauce
1 tsp dark soya saue
11/2tsp sesame oil

Mix all of the above to make soya sauce and pour onto the chicken pieces.

Chilli sauce (Malaysian Delicacies by Patsie Cheong, with slight changes)
75gm red chillies
30gm young ginger
30gm garlic
juice of 5small limes
chicken stock to taste
salt to taste

Just blend all of the above ingredients to make the dipping chilli sauce.

this is the original chicken rice balls taken from the internet. Photo credit:onestopmalaysia.comI'm submitting this for the Muhibbah Malaysian Monday Event hosted by Shaz  this month.