Soy sauce chicken

I made this based on the recipe for "rice cooker soy sauce chicken" which I found here: http://chowtimes.com/2008/01/28/rice-cooker-soy-sauce-chicken/. But since I didn't use a rice cooker (I had one, but the piece of shit broke after two weeks of intermittent use), I'm omitting that from the title.

The ingredients are simple:

• Sugar, 3 tablespoons.
• Fish sauce, ~100mL.
• Dark soy sauce, 2 tablespoons.
• Rice wine, 2 tablespoons.
• Two chicken legs with thighs, ~1.6 lbs.

Most of these are approximate since I'm not that careful with measurements. Also note that 2 tablespoons of dark soy sauce was a BIG mistake---I had meant to only use 1, but forgot and used 1 extra. The end result was that the sauce was super salty. I also used rice wine since I couldn't find rose wine.


Once the ingredients were gathered, the actual cooking part was really easy. These ingredients (including the chicken) were placed in a pot and brought to boil. I kept it at low heat (the liquid continued to boil) for 20 minutes, after which I flipped the chicken over. At this point, I noticed that the liquid had started to simmer, and decided to raise the heat to medium. (Sidebar: I once got minor food poisoning from undercooked chicken so I've been paranoid of it since). Unfortunately, the result of this was that after 15 minutes, the sauce had completely reduced and was starting to burn. However, the dish was still salvageable after discarding the skin.


I ate the chicken on a bed of steamed jasmine rice. The end result was pretty good, but really salty. Next time, I'll follow the recommendations of the original author and reduce the amount of fish sauce.


Oh, one more thing to watch out for: fish sauce is pungent. It stunk up the room for a couple of hours.