I love to cook and I am good at it too. Great teas need to compliment with great food, so I want to share some of my favorite dishes with you.

Fried rice is a popular dish among Asian cuisine. Back to the old days when microwave was not invented, one of the good way to get rid of leftover rice is to pan fry it in a wok to warm it up again. People started to throw in different variety of ingredients including eggs, meat, veggies and etc to enhance favor of it.  Many people complained to me that their fried rice became very mushy.  If you love fried rice, you need to follow my advices:

1)You need to use leftover rice. If you don’t have any, please make a pot of rice and put it in a fridge for at least a day before you use it. I normally keep it in the fridge for 2 days before i use it. The idea of using leftover rice is  the water content of leftover rice is a lot less than the fresh cooked ones. Most of the ingredients that go into fried rice generally have some sauces coming out when you saute them for a while. So you want to make your leftover rice as dried as possible, so that it could absorb all these juicy great sauce without getting too soggy. The dried leftover rice is easier to separate each rice grain too without sticking all together.

2)Oil is important. Most cuisines used a lot of oil to separate the rice grain out, and the shinny rices look good when they present it. You could use olive oil and reduce the amount of the oil, if you put the rice in the fridge longer time.

3)Heat up your wok very HOT before you put in oil and rice. It reduce the chance your rice stick to wok.

4)Pan fry each ingredient separately and mix them all in at the end. If you have green and meat together, you probably want the green still look green in the rice, right? So don’t overcook the food.

4)Combination of ingredient. You should avoid put in the ingredient which could generate a lot of sauce after pan fry it. If you do so, your fried rice will turn out like congee or rice swimming in a bowl of sauces.

5)There are dozens of varieties of fried rice, each with its own specific list of ingredients. You really don’t need to follow all these specific ingredients and you could mix in any ingredients you like is fine.

I made dried scallop and egg white fried rice today. It tastes good to me. Happy Cooking.

Posted by june / Food & Drink