Ugh, I freaking love congee.. it can be underestimated given how simple it seems, but once you add the toppings and begin to customize, that’s it. You’re hooked. Your friends are hooked, your mom's hooked (respectfully), everyone’s hooked! And if you make a bunch, you can save some for later in the fall and winter. Anyways. I know congee as a dish that comes from Chinese cuisine specifically, and this is one variation that my long time bestie T.Y. cooked and introduced me to once upon a time.

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Ingredients

• Chicken, either cooked or to be cooked
• Broth, either you make it by cooking the chickie in there or buy some chicken stock. When doing this, i do a mix of low sodium and regular. It let’s you control the salt later.
• Rice
• Ginger
• That’s it

On toppings

Toppings is where people can go huuurd (hard;) but it depends on what yoi have on you and what's avaialble. To be honest, you could eat it all plain but if you do have these…here’s one take:

• Scallion, sliced
• Shredded dried meat (there exist vegetarian ones that are even better, there is one in Berkeley, i will find the place and update this)
• Fried dried scallion or onion
• Chili oil, ideally one with garlic

There is also a collective in Oakland (Cut Fruit Collective) that has a congee poster with a bunch of different takes.

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Considerations

There’s multiple ways to approach this, but you’ll want to make sure you’re cooking your rice in chicken stock for a while while. That’s the core. If you have cooked chicken already, then you can use chicken broth and water as the base, and cook the rice there. If you have an uncooked chicken, you can cook the chicken in boiling water first, and do the process of removing the whole chicken from the broth, letting it cool, chopping it up, and using that broth to then cook the rice, and then add back in the chicken. Anyway, these are the general steps.

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Directions

Decide the above. Here, we’ll presume you have cooked chicken already. This means you can go to a store potentially, buy a whole cooked chickie, and you’re already most of the way there.

Grab rice and broth plus water. Heat broth and water in a pot. You’ll want to place more water than usual to cook the rice because (eventually) we want it to become porridge, not just cooked rice. This means we’ll be cooking the rice til it’s pretty much disintegrated, capitalizing on its starch to join forces with the chicken and become glory. Okay.

When it comes to how much liquid to rice ratio, this is likely the most difficult part. I like a very thick congee, others might prefer something more runny. I’ve seen that 1 cup of uncooked rice could use anywhere from 8 to 10 cups of broth/water for it to be cooked in at min. Again, because we don’t want all of the water to disappear.

Cook the rice in the chicken broth. Once it’s cooked through and nearly disintegrated into final porridge form, you can add the chicken and simmer for a while. The flavors will all join together, and the rice will finish releasing its starch and form.

You’ll know it’s done when the surface of the congee is shiny and fatty looking. Serve hot, and place condiments on the side. Condiments really are a personal thing, so feel free to customize over time and seek inspiration from Chinese culture.