Khao man gai is the Thai version of Hainanese chicken rice. At first glance it doesn’t look special but it’s really the simplicity of the dish that makes it so comforting and satisfying. While the presentation is simple, the preparation requires skill and care to execute the dish properly. Hainanese chicken is a popular comfort food in many Asian countries and in Chiang Mai there were a lot of open air restaurants that only serve this dish. We had our favourite khao man gai store in Chiang Mai and many years later we still reminisce about the first time we tried khao man gai.

We were really craving khao man gai because we miss travelling and our sabai sabai life in Thailand but I knew that this dish requires a lot of preparation and steps to make so I was intimidated by it. Thankfully I found an easy to follow recipe. We used Hot Thai Kitchen’s recipe (Easy Hainanese Chicken Rice Kao Mun Gai) and we were blown away by the result. The rice was perfectly oily, gingery and fluffy, the chicken was moist and the sauce was very close to what we remember. The key is to use chicken fat for the rice. In our opinion, it is so worth patiently rendering chicken fat for this dish. We recommend her recipe because it makes a simple dish with complex preparation very accessible to home cooks like us and the result is outstanding.

Here are a couple of changes we made to the original recipe:

  1. We skipped making the chicken stock (we’re blaming the baby) and instead used 1 bouillon cube that we dissolved in 1 and 2/3 cups of hot water.
  2. We used 2 chicken breasts and 2 chicken thighs (did not want to butcher our own whole chicken, again baby to blame).
  3. We also don’t have a rice cooker so we used a medium sized dutch oven. We first sautéed the garlic and ginger in chicken fat. Once the ginger and garlic are toasted, we added the rice and stirred the rice to make sure all the grains are coated with the chicken fat, ginger and garlic mixture. We then added the chicken pieces on top of the rice and then added the stock. We let the stock come to a boil then covered the pot, lowered the heat and let everything cook together. Once the chicken and rice are cooked, we removed the chicken pieces and fluffed the rice with a fork.

Here is our homemade khao man gai and our favourite khao man gai restaurant in Chiang Mai. Hope you get to try this recipe too and if you do, let us know how you like it.

The combination of garlic, ginger and chicken fat makes the rice so flavourful and cooking the chicken on top of the rice adds even more chicken essence to the rice.
Our usual lunch order: one order of fried chicken and two orders of chicken rice. The rice was flavourful, chicken tender and juicy and their house made sauce was incredibly good. Their fried chicken is also executed well with its crispy batter, juicy meat and no oiliness.
The lovely shop owner of our favorite khao man gai shop in Chiang Mai, Thailand. The store owner took your order, she then yells your order to her daughter who prepares it and her daughter then calls her dad to bring the order to your table. They were like a well oiled machine that cranked out order after order of just one dish. You had to get there early because they usually ran out early and you had to eat fast because there’s usually a line up of people waiting for their turn.