Asian Fried Rice

 

A plate of fragrant, grainy and non-oily fried rice is not too hard to cook I supposed, but yet this is a simple dish that will put your Chinese cooking skills up for challenge! Like how my little brother put it, "Taste the fried rice of a Chinese chef and if he/she could cook it right, he/she is good!". He could be generalising his thoughts but to me it makes sense.

I remembered frying a plate of fried rice using leftover rice in the middle of the night for my supper when I was in primary school using simple ingredients like garlics, eggs and black sauce and light soy sauce. Those were the good old days where we had no junk food in the house and if you want to snack, do it or get it yourself! I think the fragrant smell of the black sauce fried with garlics and rice left a profound memory in me as some of my childhood memories somehow flashed back most of the time when I savoured this dish cooked this way.

I am cooking fried rice more often as my kids love it and it is easy to prepare. My version of homecook fried rice uses less oil, less salt and only fresh ingredients... so why not?!

To me, eggs, garlics and light soy sauce are the three key basic ingredients for fried rice and of course not to mention you must have a bowl of non-sticky, non-lumpy but grainy cooked rice. The rest of the ingredients are good or healthy to have.

Cooking rice overnight just to use it for fried rice the next day is not practical for me as i am quite fickle-minded and I always change my menu last minute. If you have a bowl of left over rice then you should consider to fry it the next day.

I used to cook it on the day when I wanted to fry it. What I did is to use the right measurement of water. Gently stir the rice ten minutes after it's cooked and then covered it in the rice cooker for next 15 minutes. Then scoop out the rice, spread it over a flat plate and cool it off completely with fan.

Ingredients

1.5 cup of rice, rinsed and cooked
3 eggs
1 stick big carrots cut into small cubes
1 bowl of green peas
1 cob of fresh corn, remove the corn kernels from the cob
6 cloves of garlic, crashed n chopped coarsely
1/2 cup minced meat (pork/chicken/luncheon meat/coarsely chopped prawn or Chinese sausage etc )
Chicken or Anchovies bouillon granules to taste
Salt and pepper
2 tablespoons light soy sauce
3 tablespoons of oil

Meat marinate
1 teaspoon of soy sauce
1 teaspoon of mushroom/oyster sauce
Dash of sesame oil
Dash of pepper
1/4 teaspoon of cornflour

Method

1. Marinate the meat with the sauce and put one side for 15 minutes.

2. Beat the eggs. Put one tablespoon of oil in the frying pan. Pour in the egg and roughly scramble them after 40 seconds. Scoop and put one side.

3. Put 2 tbsp of oil in the pan. Fry garlic for about 20 seconds and add in carrots. After about a minute add in the marinated meat. Stir fry until meat about to change colour. Add in corn and peas. Fry until corn change colour. Add in light soy sauce and chicken bouillon.

4. Add in cooked and cooled rice and continue to stir gently. Once the rice is well coated with the gravy and mixed well with the rest of ingredients, add in eggs and stir well.

5. Add salt and pepper to taste.



Fried Rice with Luncheon Meat and lots of chopped small onions


Fried Rice with Black Soy Sauce


Fried Rice with Chinese Sausage and Long Beans


Fried Rice with Prawns


Notes:
1. You can used a combination of chopped small shallots and a small portion of garlic.

2. You may add 4 pieces of soaked and chopped finely dried oysters. I bet you if you can acquire the taste of Chinese dried oyster, you will like this version especially when you cook it with Chinese sausage.

3. You may add super finely chopped petai with dried shrimp chillies. For the spicy version, do omit Chinese sausage as the taste doesn't gel.

4. For the eggs, I have cooked the version keeping the ingredients to the basic with no vegetables added but just prawns, eggs and garlic. For this version, stir fry the garlic and prawn until fragrant, add in rice and continue to stir gently. Stir in the beaten eggs to the rice and mix it well so that all grain of rice will be well coated with the yellow golden egg. Otherwise you may just fry the beaten eggs and put aside. Mix when rice is fried with prawn. Frying rice with prawn is really aromatic and nice!

5. For vegetables, you can add edamane / french beans / chopped asparagus/ chopped kailan stalks and other types of crunchy vegetables. Chopped spring onions can be added towards the end.

6. For the meat, you can replace with finely chopped crab sticks, vegetarian shrimp, barbecued pork (char siew), roasted pork etc.

7. It tastes best to just use white rice but for health reason I sometimes will just used the mixture of white, red unpolished and brown rice.