Okay, so I don't do claypot stuff very often (don't know why) but besides bak kut teh, I tend to go for porridge, rice with shiitake mushrooms and iup cheong, and sesame chicken whenever I do.
In recent days I've been taking more of claypot bak kut teh from this place on Joo Chiat Road.
But also in recent days I've been taking more of this sesame chicken from a place called Lau Wang who have an outlet in Serangoon Central, as well as in Bugis Plus downtown near Victoria Street and Rochor Road.
This has got to be one of the best claypot sesame chicken I've ever eaten.
No joke, it's really good.
It's rather difficult to describe it properly though.
Like, I want to talk about the thickness of the gravy and how rich it feels on the palate but I don't know how to say it that will make you feel the same way I do.
Best way I can describe the gravy is that it's like a broth- a rich, rounded broth whose liquid wraps around your tongue and embraces you warmly with each mouthful.
The gravy broth itself might be more than enough for this particular claypot dish, but then there's still the chicken, and may I say that it's prepared very good too?
You know how some places give you pieces of chicken that are either too small in size, poorly chopped or just dry, tasteless and hard?
Not so with Lau Wang.
Each piece here is chunked to the right size that you can easily pick up with chopsticks and feel like you're picking up something.
Not only that, there aren't any tiny hidden bits of bones, something that I deeply appreciate because those specks of bones scare the s*** out of me.
I love how each chunk, never mind big or small, is in the right size, so much so that there's the feel when you pick it up, and there's the feel when you slip it inside your mouth.
One thing I like to do is to scoop up a spoonful of the gravy, drop one or two chunks into the spoon, place a morsel of rice and then eat it all at one go, gravy, chicken, rice altogether same time.
It's amazing to eat the dish this way.
Sometimes I drown my portion of rice with the gravy as well.
And I clean the claypot nearly completely.
There're quite a lot of dishes to be had over here at Lau Wang.
Offhand I can't remember what they are, but they're all broth based- very much like this sesame chicken- and then, if I'm not wrong, there's one that's got pork, there's one that's got fish, and then there's another that's got frog legs (something like that)
I'll probably want to go for the fish one, or the veggie one (I know it has brinjal) but this time round we decided to have a lighter bite and ordered a plate of homemade ngoh hiang instead.