Vietnamese-Style Chicken Bowl with Pickled Carrots

The marinade is soy, fish sauce, sugar and lime juice — salt, more salt (fish sauce brings a savoury depth soy doesn't), sweetness, and acid to brighten the whole thing and start very lightly breaking down the surface of the meat. Fifteen minutes won't transform the chicken, it just lets the surface take up flavour before the pan does the rest of the work. If you don't have fish sauce, don't substitute more soy and call it done — you'll get salt but lose the savoury backbone, so a pinch of anchovy or even a dash of Worcestershire gets you closer to the actual job fish sauce is doing.

For the oil, sesame oil is listed first but the note "or another oil for frying" is honest — sesame oil has a low smoke point and a strong flavour of its own, so if you want a hot pan and clean browning rather than a faintly scorched nutty taste, any neutral oil with no smell of its own does the actual frying job better: sunflower, groundnut, light olive oil. Save a few drops of toasted sesame oil, if you want that flavour, for right at the end, off the heat, where it won't burn.

The rice step — frying ginger and garlic in oil before the water and rice go in — isn't decoration, it's about where flavour dissolves. Ginger and garlic release their aromatic oils into fat far more readily than into water, so a brief fry blooms them before the liquid dilutes everything. Basmati itself is a long-grain rice that stays separate rather than clumping, which matters in a bowl where you want distinct components you can pick through with a fork, not a sticky mass. Covering it to simmer on a gentle heat — the kind where the water barely trembles rather than rattles the lid — stops it scorching on the bottom before the grains have absorbed what they need; then the ten minutes off the heat, lid still on, lets residual steam finish the job without the base catching. Some say lifting the lid to check doesn't matter — it does, because every lift lets steam escape that you were relying on for that final cooking.

The dressing is mayonnaise loosened and complicated by fish sauce, garlic, ginger, lime zest and pepper — essentially taking something rich and British-shelf-standard and giving it the savoury-sour backbone of the rest of the bowl, so it reads as part of the dish rather than a dollop of something foreign to it. Zest, not juice, from the lime here, because zest carries the aromatic oils without the acid unbalancing a mayonnaise base.

Everything else — cabbage, cucumber, avocado, coriander, chilli, sesame seeds — is raw and assembled, not cooked, and that's deliberate: this dish needs textural contrast against the hot chicken and soft rice, and anything you cooked here would just soften into sameness. Pointed cabbage shreds finer and stays more tender-crisp than a round white cabbage, which matters when you're eating it raw rather than braising it, but a wedge of any cabbage you shred thin will do if that's what's in the fridge.

For four people this is one pan, one small pot for rice, one pot for the pickle — in a flat kitchen with a single hob and a couple of rings, do the pickle first since it just sits and cools while you're occupied elsewhere, then rice, then chicken last so it's hot when it hits the bowl. No kazan, no special kit — a wide frying pan and a lid substitute (a plate over the rice pot works, or foil pressed down, if your pot doesn't have one) get you through all of it.