Deep Dive on Egg Fried Rice

Egg Fried Rice (蛋炒饭 dan chao fan) is the measure of a Chinese home cook. When done well it is table-slappingly good.

When it's done poorly I will still eat the whole dang thing doesn't matter. It's an easy and satisfying comfort food that goes with any meal of the day.

There are many variants of this dish, feel free to switch it up. I don't have precise measurements but here's a video of me making it and eating it.

by Lester Han, guest contributer

Ingredients:

• 1.5 - 2 cups of cooked, preferably overnight rice.
• 1 or 2 eggs or 3 if you like eggs very much like me
• a sprig of scallion
  • can substitute with a small amount of onions
• chinese cured sausage
  • can substitute with some spam or oyster mushrooms or bacon
• 1.5 tablespoon light soy sauce
• Optional
  • japanese style nori rice seasoning
  • chili crisps (I use lao gan ma in the vid)

Steps:

• Dice up the scallion and the sausage (or your substitutes)
• Get some cooked white rice. I use about 1.5 - 2 cups? Rice need to be cold or room temp (old school home cooks use overnight rice)
• Separate the yolk and whites of an egg. I used two cuz I love eggs, but this makes the end result stickier
• Mix the yolk into the rice. Mix very well, try to coat EVERY GRAIN OF RICE with yolk. (If your rice was hot here, it would cook the yolk and result in sadness)
• ASK YOURSELF IF YOU'RE READY TO COOK!
• Heat your pan or wok, turn it on medium to medium high, pour in 1 or 2 tablespoons of neutral cooking oil (canola, vegetable, or peanut). Enough to coat the pan.
• Dip a chopstick (obviously you have a pair right?) into your rice mixture, then into the pan. If you hear a sizzle and the egg coating is puffing up slightly, you're ready to cook. Don't wait for the pan to get too hot as to not burn the egg. If your pan is giving off smoke, that means the oil is at its smoking temp and you need to remove the pan from the heat to cool off.
• Pour your rice + yolk mixture into the pan. With a big spoon or spatula, flatten the rice so you get a large surface area cooking the rice.
• Wait until you hear popping sounds and/or see some grains of rice jump up a little, stir the rice.
• Make some space in the pan for your other ingredients, put in your protein/mushroom and scallion/onion
  • I'm doing this because I'm lazy. When done properly they should be cooked separately.
• Stir the non-rice ingredients till your kitchen smells great
• Pour in the egg whites and incorporate everything in the pan
• Mix and stir fry the whole thing.
  • What you want to do here is a front and back movement with the pan while agitating the rice so every ingredient takes turns getting cooked at the bottom while other parts of the rice gets their turn on top to cool off. This is why the wok is well suited to this style of cooking, with its curved high walls.
• Pour in the 1.5 tablespoons light soy sauce from the outside lip of the pan. This will both add an umami punch to the rice and add some moisture.
• Keep frying to incorporate the soy sauce.
• The whole frying process should only take a few minutes.
• We're done when we see that the whole dish is evenly darkened by the soy sauce. Turn off the heat and scoop out your rice into a bowl.
• I like topping it with a sunny side up egg, couple cracks of the ol' pepper grinder. A dash of nori rice seasoning, and a teaspoon of spicy chili crisp

Hot tips:

• The platonic ideal of fried rice is that each grain of rice is separated, when frying it shall flow like sand! This is so that each grain is coated with flavour and at no point should a mouthful of rice be bland white rice!
• Use overnight rice. After a night of storage (covered with a lid or wrap) the starch in the rice would have absorbed the a lot of the moisture and dry up on the outside. When cooking we are adding moisture to it so it won't be too dry to eat!
• When cooking the rice with a big spoon or spatula, never use the tip or the sharp end to press the rice. Use the flat part to flatten the rice gently or scoop it from the bottom and toss it up. This is so that we don't break the rice grains and release loose starch that can make the end result sticky, which can ruin the texture of the dish.
• For more in-depth information on fried rice, please see this scene from the 1996 Hong Kong comedy film God of Cookery (sry for the mando dub)
• Here's another scene from the movie that features the Sorrowful Rice (spoilers!)