Fried rice is one of those dishes that a lot of people seem to struggle with, so there’s no shortage of people online that bicker about this or that. Some people insist that you need to use day old rice and only day old rice, others insist think that fresh rice is completely ok. Some people will breathlessly tell you to heat a wok up to magma-esque temperatures, others are completely content in their non-stick. People argue about egg. About rice varietals. About liquid ratios. And so on, and so on.
For the novice cook, I’m sure it could all seem a bit dizzying. The internet’ll probably continue debating this all up until that final day when a nuclear winter takes out Alphabet’s very last server… so it’d be the height of foolishness for me to try to proclaim The One And Only True Way to fry up something as universal as rice. But what I hope I can do here is, at the very least, teach you one straightforward, reasonably easy approach — an approach that can yield you some restaurant-quality Chinese fried rice in a fraction of the time of many other recipes.
Because what I’m about to say may contradict a bit of internet fried rice dogma, I should lay some cards on the table. This is final result of this method — observe the clean, separate grains of rice. Pixel peep if you must.
I swear I’m not trying to be obnoxious on purpose. It’s just… over the years I’ve grown increasingly weary of arguing about fried rice online, with much of the dogma seemingly completely divorced from any kind of tangible end result.
The problem of fried rice
Take some rice. Rinse it (of course), then put it in your trusty rice cooker along with the requisite amount of water. Cook your rice like you’d always cook your rice… then take it out and try to fry the stuff directly.
You’ll be greeted with a… clumpy mess. Rice that’s straight out of the rice cooker is far to sticky to actually fry — generally speaking, with fresh rice the best you can hope to do is “mix”.
Now, don’t get me wrong: just mixing stuff together? Also completely valid, and can make an incredibly tasty end result in and of itself. Basically, what you’d do is whip up a stir fry — generally speaking, something on the saucier side — and just mix your cooked rice together with your stir fry. In China, you can see the mixing approach in dishes like fantastically delicious Toishanese Youfan, and (to the best of my understanding) a very similar method is employed in Korean Kimchi Fried Rice. And for the curious, we also have a video on mixed rice if you like.
But Korean nomenclature aside, sometimes you want a fried rice though, yeah? You know, something like you’d get at a Chinese restaurant — dry, loose, fluffy individual grains. And if that’s the end result that you’re pining for, the mixing method just won’t get you there — you have to actually fry the stuff.
So then enter: yesterday’s rice. Compared to today’s rice, that rice that you whipped up yesterday? Much dryer, especially (and importantly!) on the surface. There’s still some clumping, but you can break that up in the wok. And it works.
Why people use day old rice
Generally speaking (emphasis on the general), southern Chinese meals are centered around a pot of rice. You load up the rice cooker, set it and forget it, and use that as the staple starch of the meal. Quite often, a Chinese family will use their rice cooker every day — and quite often, things end up running at a slight surplus… with leftover rice cooker rice a common sight when you open up the refrigerator.
The next day, you could just sprinkle a bit of water on the rice and nuke it, of course, but as I said before… that dry day old rice can make for a very solid fried rice. So in many Chinese home kitchens, you see fried rice as a ‘next day dish’ for lunch or dinner that can absorb up those leftovers.
But now I want you to think about your personal cooking situation. Do you make rice in your rice cooker every day, or at least a couple times a week? If yes, the day-old-rice method is a go-to for Chinese home kitchens for good reason! It can be a touch finicky at times, but it’s a fantastic way to use up that leftover white rice.
Do you break out your rice cooker less than once a week, or [gasp!] not even own one? Can you barely remember the last time you’ve had leftover white rice sitting there in your fridge? If yes, forget about the day-old-rice method. You don’t need to dutifully plan your fried rice days in advance, because… using day-old-rice isn’t even the best method for fried rice.
What is, then, you ask?
The Steamed Rice Method
There’s a few ways that rice was traditionally prepared in China, before the advent of the rice cooker.
Probably the most common method you’re already well aware of. Rinse some rice, toss it in a pot together with enough water to come up to your knuckle. Toss on a lid, cook til it’s done.
Works perfectly well, but there is a slight hitch. If you’re cooking a lot of rice — like, festival time for a big family portion — often times the final rice texture isn’t phenomenal. So instead, you can use another rice preparation method: the steaming method.
The way you’d do it is this: first, you par-boil your (rinsed, of course) rice. Couple minutes at a rolling boil, kind of like how you’d cook pasta. You don’t want the rice to be completely cooked at this stage, however – just cooked enough for the rice to have lost a bit of its transparency. You then load up that rice into a big, wet cloth, and toss it all in one of these big buckets (called 甑子):
Then you grab that big bucket, place it over a large wok of bubbling water, and let it steam.
You can still see restaurants that follow this steaming method for their white rice. Putz into a restaurant in Sichuan, often you can just scoop some yourself, at your leisure. And it’s a pretty cool method — I personally quite enjoy the looser, less sticky texture of par-boiled-then-steamed rice. Not going to replace my rice cooker anytime soon for convenience-related-reasons, but it’s a nice rice.
But where steamed rice particularly shines is fried rice. That steamed rice is awesome for fried rice is something that — back in the day at least — was practically common knowledge, stretching from the North to the Southwest.
In Li Chunfang and Fan Guozhong’s “闾巷话蔬食”, retrospective of village life outside of Beijing in the 1930s, they write:
现在多用焖饭，其实真正的炒饭还是用捞饭来炒好
Nowadays, people use boiled rice [i.e. normal rice], but for the most authentic fried rice it’s better to used par-boiled and steamed rice. [pg 5]
Similarly, in Huang Xiaoji’s “一个村庄的食单”, a discussion of food in a Hunan village in the 1950s, he states:
剩饭也不甚好炒，炒时满锅黏附…
这饭炒食也好，依然粒粒可数
Leftover (boiled) rice is not good to fry, it will stick everywhere in the wok.
This (steamed) rice is good to fry, the grains will remain separate. [pg 4, 8]
It’s not an uncommon approach for professional kitchens these days, either: after all, the logistics of steaming some rice for a restaurant can sometimes be a bit easier than leaving out XYZ pounds of leftover rice from service the night before.
And, it’s a method that I — being an avid rice cooker using-homecook mostly based in urban south China — came painfully late to. As I said before, even day-old-rice fried rice can get a little finicky! You need to break up all the clumps, scrape to avoid stickage, and fry for a non-insignificant period of time to get to that loose, fluffy stage.
Using steamed rice? As the above authors imply, frying rice becomes a painfully simply process — you almost don’t need to do anything.
The logistical problem of steamed rice in a western kitchen
So, you’re convinced: steamed rice is best for fried rice.
But I can already hear a few of you groaning that this is already too much work. First boil, then toss into some sort of wet cloth, then break out the bamboo steamer, then fry the rice, then wash the damn sticky/starchy cloth?
To be completely frank, that whole process was a little annoying for me even — mostly because washing that rice cloth? Sucks royally (though Steph says I’m being lazy and overdramatic). But over the years, I streamlined that process for my own kitchen, and it’s something that I think can travel pretty well into the standard not-build-for-Chinese-food kitchen as well.
All you need is a fine mesh sieve, and a suitably sized pot that the fine mesh sieve can sit in, like so:
An overview of our “Strainer method”
This is still a slight multi-step process I know, but I promise that you can sort it all within like a half hour, give or take.
Rinse your rice, of course
Dump the rice in a pot of boiling water. Cook it ala pasta, 3 minutes
Strain the rice, keep it in the strainer.
Quickly rinse your cooking pot, and add in a touch more water (~2 inches worth). Bring to a boil.
Lay your rice filled strainer onto the pot and cover. Wrap a damp towel around the lid to ‘seal’ things closed (or wrap the strainer with foil, both are ok). Steam for 15 minutes.
While everything is steaming, this is the time that you can prepare all the add-ins to your fried rice, measure your seasoning, etc.
Once the rice is done steaming, transfer it to a plate.
Fry your rice
Recipe, Scallion Fried Rice with Egg
Ok, so let’s put this all together.
This method will work with any Chinese (or Thai) style fried rice you want to do, but let’s just sort a super simple, bog-standard Scallion Fried Rice with Egg:
Ingredients:
Jasmine rice (粘米/泰国香米), 230g. Calrose is also fine.
Eggs, two medium
Seasoning for the egg: salt, ⅛ tsp; sugar, ⅛ tsp
Scallion, ~2 stalks, ~40g
Lard (猪油), for frying, ~2.5 tbsp. Using lard for frying rice is particularly delicious, but you can use any oil you like. Peanut, corn, soybean, whatever. In some Japanese fried rices they use butter as a base, also tasty.
Soy sauce (生抽), optional, ~2 tsp. If you pushed me, I think I prefer fried rice sans soy sauce, but I know a lot of people enjoy the addition. If you don’t use soy sauce, up the salt quantity in the seasoning by a quarter teaspoon.
Seasoning for the rice: salt, 1/2 tsp; sugar, 1 tsp; MSG (味精), ¼ tsp; white pepper powder (白胡椒粉), ¼ tsp. MSG is western supermarket available under the brand name ‘Accent’. If you dislike white pepper powder or don’t have it on hand, you can swap for black pepper, but cut the quantity to 1/8 tsp.
Process:
Rinse your rice 2-3 times. You don’t need to be paranoid here (especially because we’ll be par-boiling things), just a quick rinse to get off a touch of the surface starch.
Boil your rice for 3 minutes. It should look like this at this stage.
Dump into your strainer, set aside. Give the pot a super brief rinse to get off a bit of the starch, then add in ~3 inches of water. Bring to a boil.
Poke a couple holes in the rice to allow for more even heating. Nestle the steamer in, and cover with a lid. Wrap a damp cloth around the opening of the pot so that not too much steam escapes (a little bit is ok). You can alternatively wrap the top of the strainer with aluminum foil — whatever’s easiest in your kitchen:
Steam for 15 minutes.
As that’s steaming, prepare everything else. Toss that bit of salt to the egg and beat it thoroughly. Slice up your scallion. Toss all your seasoning in a little bowl and mix them together.
Once the times up, taste your rice. It should be completely cooked through at this stage. If you find it a touch undercooked, don’t panic, just toss it all back in for another 10 minutes (it’s pretty difficult to over-steam rice). Once cooked through, lay it on a plate.
To fry, we’ll just use a non-stick skillet. You can obviously also use a carbon steel wok too if your prefer (a wok will give you a little more room to work with, but either is will work great). Add in one tablespoon of your lard and let it melt over a medium low flame. Once it’s hot enough where little bubbles can form around a pair of chopsticks, pour the egg in a thin stream while stirring vigorously.
Now, what we like for our egg here is little bits of grain sized egg evenly incorporated within our fried rice, so to get there we’ll drizzle the egg in while stirring, then continuously kind of ‘smush’ it to break it up. This motion so that the egg can shred into little pieces and incorporate well with our final rice. After about three to four minutes of that motion, you should be looking at something a bit like this, which’s called guihuadan or osmanthus egg in Chinese:
But if you don’t care, that’s also fine, just scramble however you feel like it. Then just scooch that all to the side, and up your heat to medium.
Once the egg is cooked, scooch it to the side of the skillet and add in another tablespoon of lard. Once melted, add in your steamed rice. Quickly fry the rice for a bit in the lard, then combine them together. The reason we add the lard in stages is because egg has a tendency to really absorb oil — if you don’t care, that’s also fine, it’ll also totally work if you added all the oil at once in the beginning.
Continue to fry for once minute, then sprinkle in the soy sauce. Stir to combine the soy sauce into the rice, one more minute. Sprinkle in your seasoning, mix well to combine. Add in the scallion, shut off the heat. Mix well, fin.
Went to make some fried rice and when I looked in the fridge for the day-old rice come find out grandma had thrown it out. Remembered this post and made an "emergency steamed rice" which led to the best fried rice EVER.