chinese clay pot rice - 煲仔飯

Most self-respecting foodies know what paella is. I love paella and I own 4 different sizes of paella pans made from mild steel with the beautiful little dimples on the bottom.

Clay pot rice 煲仔飯 (meaning rice in a little pot) is probably the closest Southwest Chinese dish to Spanish paella. Both are one-vessel heavenly meal made with good rice and with love.

clay pot master manning all the clay pot rice clients ordered - circa 2008 winter in north point, hong kong

These are many similarities:

• you cook the rice dish starting with raw grains of rice
• it is a self-contained one-dish meal you cook (typically) with all raw ingredients
• the only rule is there is no rule except your sense of taste of what go together and what don't
• while there are a lot of worthy contender ingredients, the one on the center stage is always the crispy rice on the bottom and side that soaked up the tasty juice brought by the ingredients
• the dish is prepared in an open flame
• you eat it straight out of the cooking vessel with a spoon (hopefully scrap hard the crispy and tasty rice off the side and bottom)
• both use a vessel made of economic material with time proven design (clay and mild steel)

just half a chinese sausage is used - to maintain my trimmed figure

cut sausage into thin slices - other ingredients: live clams, button mushroom, korean pepper, ginger, and yellow chives

high heat open flame

the rice is still very soggy - needs a miniute or two more

finished bowl of clay pot rice 煲仔飯

you can see the crispy rice by the spoon

yum! not even one grain of rice escaped - the chop sticks were never needed

The classic clay pot used here has been in use in China at least for centuries. They are made with very coarse clay and  have rough appearance and uneven construction, though seldom hinders their functions. Only the interior is glazed. The unglazed clay is very porous and would soak up water like a sponge. When coated with oil during cooking the glazing has a surface characteristic of a natural non-stick, yet can withstand very high heat. The relatively coarse glazing retains small amount of oil similar to the honed surface of a cast iron cylinder wall in an automotive engine. This is the most important attribute of this clay pot cookware. For someone that know how to care for one a clay pot can last a very long time eventhough the buildup of stains on the unglazed portion is unavoidable. A clay pot like this eventually dies.

While extremely durable for it's low cost, the biggest threat to them is thermal shock and extreme uneven heating. The latter is something I experienced the hard way when I used to cook with stove made of coiled electric heating elements. The bottom of the pot tends to form hairline crack or even catastrophic failure under high heat.

Clay pot like this used to be very affordable. I have a collection of 3 sizes. The one use here is the smallest and is intended for a single person meal. For this size I have 4 allowing me to serve this for a party of 4. You can see the identical size pots are used by the restaurant in Hong Kong in the first photo above. Larger ones are used for meals shared by a few people as in making this vegetable dish.

For some the notion of these small pots with such limited purpose may seem foreign. For me it bring great culinary pleasure when one can use it to it's fullest potential, like a good classic Spanish pealla pan. In addition to making a one-pot-meal for 1 person, the small pot can be use to make a dish to be shared by a number of person. For a shared meal, one can create 3 or 4 dishes all made in these little pots. One of them can even be a soup.

Due to their ease of construction these pots used to be very affordable. In recent years the price of them have increased significant and also became very scarce. Their scarcity may largely due to most people nowadays do not know how to care for them. In many stores this iconic pot can no longer be found. Instead they are replaced with a variety with similar appearance but constructed of metal. I have no experience with the metal ones and I suspect most do not have the same semi non-stick surface characteristic. I have seen some constructed of a cast alloy, and a lot made with sheet stainless steel. I would advise against the stainless steel construction - due to poor heat conduction, lack of thermal mass, and very sticky surface with burnt food. Making this dish with a stainless steel pot likely would end in a disastrous result.