When I was touring Italy, I fell in love with arancini at first bite. It was an ubiquitous street food, and could be found in every pizzeria and every other kebab shop. In Singapore, however, only restaurants serve arancini, taking it away from its hood roots. However, @saporitasg has brought it back to its original street food origins with their chicken arancini ($8 nett for 3 balls) in a hawker centre setting.

The tomato ragu soaked rice encapsulates a core of chicken and mozzarella cheese, and these beautiful balls are coated in breadcrumbs and deep fried for that aesthetic golden brown finish. There isn’t much chicken inside the arancini, but there’s a megaton of sumptuous flavours in there. The fluffy rice is savoury & slightly tangy from absorbing the tomato ragu, and the mozzarella cheese is melted enough for some stretchy, sexy cheesy action. The exterior layer of breadcrumbs has just enough thickness to produce a pleasant crunch with every bite and hold the arancini together, and never came close to being too dense and bread-like.⠀

In fact, these arancini were so ambrosial that even the birds around wanted them. Yep, we left the plate of arancini on the table and turned our backs for a couple of minutes, and turned back to realise that a bird had stolen an entire arancini. Cheeky bastard.

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