Old Chang Kee Chicken Rice Curry Puff Review: Better Than The Original for Sure

Last Updated on 2019-01-19 , 4:21 pm

Before anything, here’s a disclaimer to show my absolute bias against the original Old Chang Kee curry puff: I hate it.

The skin is so thick and floury that I feel like I’m having a chicken pie instead. The chicken is so hard that it can be used to make a bulletproof vest. And there are just so many potatoes that I feel like I’ve downed nothing but empty calories.

I prefer those 3 for $1 curry puffs, whereby the filling is a mixture of air and potatoes. That’s bae.

But it’s just me, because most people I know love Old Chang Kee’s curry puffs so much that they’d make it a point to buy one when they pass by an outlet.

So when Old Chang Kee came out with the Chicken Rice Curry Puff?

I’ve no expectations. At all.

But boy were I wrong.

What the Heck is the Chicken Rice Curry Puff?

Lest you haven’t developed the habit to come in to our app daily (which you really should), you might not know that Old Chang Kee has done the unthinkable: they’ve come out with a Chicken Rice Curry Puff.

And unlike the infamous Nasi Lemak Burger, this curry puff comes with rice.

According to Old Chang Kee, Hainanese chicken rice is stuffed into its signature puff pastry together with steamed boneless chicken chunks, coriander leaves, garlic and shallots. A dash of Old Chang Kee Hainanese Chilli sauce (what lai de?) and dark soy sauce would be added for the finishing touch.

You might have barfed a little at the fact that the traditional curry puff is now housing rice, but hold your horses because surprising, it actually blends pretty well.

Taste Test

I won’t need to show you how it looks like because it looks exactly like their usual curry puffs, so there’s no Instagram-worthy moments.

When I take a bite, that damn thick and floury skin turned me off again.

But what comes next is, for the lack of a better word, surprising.

Nothing in the curry puff tastes like chicken rice (McDonald’s must have normalized this behaviour with their sour egg yolk fries), but nevertheless, there’s a slight tingle of chicken rice smell.

The chicken is soft and large, more like chicken thighs instead of chicken breasts, but it’s not the star here.

The rice tastes a tad spicy, like the usual potatoes, and shockingly, they actually blend better with the skin than those damn potatoes. It tastes like the rice has been cooked the same way as the potatoes (pretty sure that’s not the case) and its softness makes each bite almost irresistible.

For the first time in my life, I’m enjoying an Old Chang Kee curry puff.

No Chicken Rice Feel

Even after downing the entire curry puff and crying for one more, I still couldn’t find any correlation between chicken rice and this curry puff except for its name.

But still, it’s worth the calories: in fact, I would say that if every curry puff is filled with rice, it might just make curry puffs all over the world great again.

You’d have guessed my rating: 4.5 stars out of 5 stars.

And I think someone’s going to stuff mee pok into curry puff next.