삼계탕
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삼계탕 is Korean chicken soup made with ginseng, garlic, 대추, and sweet rice. It is nourishing, comforting, and delicious! They're often made with 오골계.
More pictures from my first try making it.
Recipe
- one whole chicken
- one fresh ginseng root, or a handful of dried roots
- 5-6 dried 대추
- one head of garlic
- about a pound of sweet rice
Soak the sweet rice for 8-10 hours.
Place the chicken in a pot of cold water and bring it to a boil. Let it boil 5-10 minutes. Dump the water, and let chicken cool. This will get rid of the denatured proteins (the scummy foam) and some of the fat.
Meanwhile, cut the stem off of the ginseng root, and slice it into centimeter-wide slices. Peel the garlic cloves. If you're using dried ginseng or 대추, rinse them off.
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Stuff the chicken with the sweet rice. Place all the ingredients in a large pot of water. Bring to boil, then simmer for 4-8 hours (depending on the type of chicken you use; see notes below), skimming the fat regularly. If you have extra rice, add it two hours before the cooking is complete.
Notes
According to Mom, 삼계탕 is typically made with a young hen (40 days), which in Korea, tend to be fairly skinny. If you use a young chicken, four hours should be enough.
When I made it, I used an old stewing hen, which requires 6-8 hours of cooking. If you cook it long enough, the chicken meat becomes tender enough to shred and incorporate in the soup.
The recipe calls for using enough rice to stuff the chicken. I had a skinny chicken, and I used tons of water to make lots of broth. I could easily have included all of the extra sweet rice (about 4/5 of a pound total to go with a 4 pound chicken), and it would have made the broth thicker and delicious. Simply add the rice two hours before cooking is complete.
Mom likes to remove the skin before cooking the chicken, which removes some of the fat up-front. It also makes it hard to stuff the chicken. She suggests cooking the rice in a rice cooker first, then adding it to the broth an hour before cooking is complete. I think adding it two hours before is better, as it maintains the integrity of the rice. (Cooking it in a rice cooker homogenizes the rice into a big, sticky mass.
