Hokkien Fried Rice | 福建炒饭 | Fried Rice Friday #2 | Easy Asian Cooking

Last week on our very first Fried Rice Friday we made the classic Yangzhou fried rice. Today something very very different. I'm making Fujian or Hokkien style fried rice. There's a huge difference between that that classic Yangzhou fried rice style which is you know a lot of nicely cut ingredients thrown together with some rice and egg versus this Fujian style fried rice. Yangzhou fried rice is from Jiangsu prefecture which is where they make these kind of things which is why the knife work for Yangzhou fried rice is very important. Hokkien or Fujian fried rice is from Fujian prefecture which is a very very different thing. You see in Fujian that's the home of the Hokkien people, the maritime kind of sailing people that went down throughout Southeast Asia and across to Taiwan. So actually this Fujian or Hokkien fried rice is a Taiwanese dish and what characterizes it is this kind of mix of ingredients that you get from Hokkien cuisine because they sailed a lot. The Fujianese or Hokkien people are known for ingredients like this, dried scallops, a lot of dried seafood that were carried on nautical voyages but also there's it's an area where the land meets the sea so you have a lot of people coming from the mountainous areas bringing things like bamboo shoots and shiitake mushrooms and so your Hokkien noodles that you might find throughout Southeast Asia or even in Australia and your Hokkien fried rice are kind of similar in the combination of ingredients that they bring together. The style of cooking the fried rice however is very very different. It's essentially an egg fried rice, a very simple egg fried rice with a thick braised sauce that goes over the top. So let's get started. The ingredients, the dried scallops I was talking about, a few aromatics, the garlic and the ginger, a bit of spring onion as well, some carrot, shiitake mushrooms, bamboo shoots. This is a bit of sort of Taiwanese, very firm tofu, some chicken, eggs for the fried rice and then some prawns as well. As with most wok fried dishes, I've got to start by cutting it up. I'll begin with the aromatics. A bit of ginger first, peel that with a spoon and then just thinly shred it. A bit of garlic too. Spring onions I really just want to cut into lengths because this is all going into kind of a braised thing so it doesn't have to be too finely sliced. Carrot too and for this I actually just want to use a Chinese technique called a rolling cut. It's really just a matter of rolling the carrot over and over and then slicing at diagonal angles. It'll give me nice kind of irregular chunks in the carrot. Cubes of tofu as well and my shiitake mushrooms and a little bit of bamboo shoot too. You can probably see that I'm cutting all of these things a lot more for a braised dish than I would for say a fried rice type dish because that's exactly what this is. The fried rice is kind of secondary to all the rest of this but it really is a thick braise in what you would call a Chinese brown sauce that we're going to make up from some soy sauce and oyster sauce and those kind of things but you'll see what I mean when I get to the end. Some chicken, just some nice decent sized chunks of that and this is all kind of like one to two centimetre size dice. For our Yangzhou fried rice last week it was all about half a centimetre so it's a lot bigger here for the Hokkien style fried rice just because as we're braising it's going to favour larger pieces. Very, very lightly marinate that. A bit of soy sauce, a bit of corn flour, a bit of Shaoxing wine. The prawns I'll leave whole, the scallops and the soaking liquid I'll leave as well and then the ingredients for my sauce are basically just a bit of oyster sauce, some chicken stock, Shaoxing wine and then I'll season that with some sugar and soy sauce and various things, thickening it up with a bit of corn starch later on. Oh my eggs! This is just for the fried rice component of Hokkien fried rice. All right now it's time to head to the wok. So the process for our Hokkien fried rice is actually a little bit different. It starts first with a very basic egg fried rice so let's just do that first and get it out of the way. I've got my beaten egg and I've got my day-old jasmine rice that's been chilled in the fridge so it's actually quite dry and firm. Now if you don't know the reason for that go back to the video from last week, should be just up there somewhere and you can see why. We're going to use the silver over gold method again that's in the video up there so make sure you know how to do that before you proceed. Hot wok, decent amount of oil around the edge and then straight in with the eggs. Whip that around until it starts to dry and set and in with the rice. Just some salt to season, nothing else. Push that against the side of the wok and break it up. That looks pretty good, pretty plain but there's gonna be a lot of flavour going over the top. Just throw that into a bowl and set that aside. Now for the kind of braised sauce part of what we're doing. Again with a hot wok, more oil in and I'll start with my aromatics, my garlic and ginger when they become fragrant in my chicken, my vegetables and these dried scallops with their soaking liquid. It looks really, really good. I'm not going to add my prawns just yet because I want those to kind of go in at the end so that they stay nice and kind of lightly cooked. Nothing worse than an overcooked prawn. Now I need to build my braise or my sauce up. Chicken stock first and then in with my different flavourings and seasonings. Some oyster sauce, soy sauce, some sugar. Now this is a really important part. I want to taste this now to make sure that I'm on the right track. Does it need more salt? Does it need a little bit more sweetness? Okay that's pretty good, that's pretty good. I actually do need a bit of Shaoxing wine as well and I'll just let this simmer for about five minutes. All the different ingredients are going to start to soften. Now I can throw my prawns in and the last step is to thicken everything. So cornflour mixed with a bit of cold, make sure it's cold stock or even cold water. Start to drizzle that in, not all at once. I want to do it sort of three times because nothing's worse than sort of putting it all in at once and it becoming too gluggy. So add a little bit, have a look, see how it's going. Go in again. Okay it's starting to thicken now but it could probably just be a little bit thicker. I don't want it to be too watery because you know we're putting this over the top of fried rice. If it's too watery it's going to soak straight into the rice. It's going to be very very unpleasant. So I do want it to be quite thick. Look at that consistency, that's exactly what I want. So I can turn off the heat, take my fried rice and my braise and head back to put the dish together. Okay time to put it together. Now this is how you want a Chinese brown sauce to taste. I'm going to give it another little try now. Delicious. It's got a lovely texture from the cornflour. That's actually the oil that's quite important for a dish like this. The mixture of stock, oil and cornflour gives that silky texture but the taste of this is very sort of savoury and it's not overpowering like there's no oystery flavour from the oyster sauce. It's just the flavour and taste of the ingredients that are in there kind of bolstered by this slightly sweet, mainly savoury style of sauce that goes over the top. So how do we put it together? Just like this. I've packed my egg fried rice into this bowl. I'll just keep that quite firm. I'll turn that out onto here. There we go. Then our brown sauce mixture goes over the top. There you go. A fried rice dish unlike any other you might have seen before. That is Hokkien style fried rice.