No browning at all, and the most tender bird you will cook. The poaching liquid becomes the stock and the rice is cooked in it.
Rub the salt inside and out. An hour on the counter is enough — this is seasoning rather than a full dry brine, because there is no skin to crisp here and nothing to gain from drying it out.
Ginger and spring onion into a pot deep enough to submerge the bird. Fill with cold water, bring it up slowly, and hold it at the point where the surface shivers but no bubbles break. Somewhere around 85 °C.
Breast down keeps the leanest meat in the hottest, most stable part of the pot and away from the surface. Top up with hot water if the bird is not covered.
Hold the temperature. Forty to forty-five minutes for a 1.5 kg bird. If the water starts to bubble, pull the pot half off the heat.
Another thirty minutes with the bird sitting in the hot liquid off the heat. This is not resting — the bird is still cooking, gently, on residual heat, and it is where the last few degrees come from.
Target is 72 °C in the thigh, same as a roast. Temperature reference →
Lift the bird out and plunge it into a bowl of iced water for five minutes. This stops the cooking dead and, more usefully, sets the skin and the layer of collagen under it into something silky rather than flabby. It is the step people skip and then wonder why theirs is different.
Grated ginger, sliced spring onion and salt in a heatproof bowl. Heat the oil until it shimmers and just begins to smoke, then pour it over in one go. It will hiss violently. Stir, and taste for salt once it has settled.
This dish is not meant to be hot. Joint it, arrange it, spoon the sauce over.
Strain the poaching liquid and keep it — it is a light, clean chicken stock that cost you nothing, and it is the best possible liquid for cooking rice.
The water boiled. At a rolling boil the muscle fibres contract hard and squeeze out the water they were holding, and the texture goes from silky to shredded. There is no recovering it.
The fix is mechanical rather than a matter of judgement: keep a lid half on, keep the pot to one side of the burner, and check it every ten minutes. A pot that has been stable for twenty minutes can still come to the boil when the room cools and the thermostat kicks in.