Over the past six years of living in Thailand, French chef Arnaud Dunand Sauthier of the two-Michelin-starred Le Normandie in the Mandarin Oriental Bangkok has developed a penchant for Thai-style chicken rice or khao man gai. He says with great relish: “I eat a lot of chicken rice with my kids. It is a good dish to eat fast, with good ingredients such as the rice, chicken and sauce.”
For his inaugural trip to Singapore to cook at the 2018 MICHELIN Guide Singapore Gala Dinner, he has injected some French flair into chicken rice, which is also a popular dish in the city-state.
His innovative interpretation of chicken rice features a fragrant rice emulsion that has been concocted with chicken stock, coriander, ginger, garlic and chicken fat, and a tender slab of sous vide French organic chicken breast. The condiments are artistically presented in the form two intertwined strips of pickled cucumber studded with black garlic jelly, and coriander and pandan puree.
For my first visit to Singapore, I wanted to do something Singaporean. And what else is more Singaporean than chicken rice? I eat a lot of Thai-style chicken rice in Bangkok, but there are a few restaurants that serve Singapore food there. I ate at these places and asked the chefs for their recipes and made my version that is a cross between Singaporean and Thai versions of chicken rice with some Western touches.
What goes into this dish?
I bring out the ingredients that are used to cook chicken rice and work around them. The rice emulsion is a foam that is made from cooking the rice with chicken fat. The rice in the Thai version contains more fat than in the Singaporean version of chicken rice. The Thai version also doesn’t use much light soya sauce. For the condiments, I make black garlic jelly, instead of garlic, to go with pickled cucumbers, and pandan and coriander puree.
For my interpretation of chicken rice, the principles of cooking to create the French taste are the same as how I cook at Le Normandie. I use French products such as the organic chicken. I added coriander and pandan puree, which gives the dish some bitterness — something that is not commonly found in Asian dishes. Bitterness is part of the French flavour profile that also reflects my personality.
The theme of this year’s MICHELIN Guide Singapore Gala Dinner is “The Past Through Tomorrow”. How does the past inspire your cooking?
When we create something, we always look back on the past and take inspiration from old recipes, chefs and culinary spirit. If you create one or two recipe in your career, that’s a lot already. The rest is just interpretation of old recipes.
