Chicken stuffed with semi-sticky rice

I've always wanted to debone a chicken. It just seemed like a useful skill. I didn't remove every bone, just the torso. Rib cage, pelvis, spine. Basically left the limbs alone. And I even did it without having to cut the chicken open too much! The hardest part was teasing the skin from the spine. It's amazing how much room is in there after it becomes a deflated chicken. It was then marinated for a while in soy sauce.

The rice was a mixture of 2/3 sticky rice and 1/3 normal rice. Not Uncle Ben's type though since that's white people rice. I added too much shitake mushrooms, corn, some parsley that never came through flavour-wise, and some chinese preserved sausage. I was quite surprised that it all cooked up well as a mixture in the rice cooker!

Then came the stuffing of the rice into the chicken cavity. As noted before, there's alot more room without the confines of the bones, so I had to prepare alot more stuffing material than usual. This also means a much denser chicken to be baked in the oven. So I even got a meat thermometer to make sure the center was well cooked. I tied the baby up with butcher twine and in it went at 375 degrees for about an hour or so. The aroma was just amazing!

I was very pleased with how it turned out. The chicken was a bit too salty becase of the soy sauce bath, but it was balanced out by the blander rice that didn't get any salt or flavouring during cooking. And it stayed together! No breaches in the chicken skin at all!