5 Leftover Rice Dishes to Make Any Night of the Week | From The Test Kitchen | Bon Appétit

I'm Chris Morocco here in the BA Test Kitchen, and today we're talking about rice. The kind of leftover rice you probably have in your fridge right now. Cooked, cooled rice, every dish's best friend. It is untapped potential, you can take it anywhere. Whatever you do, don't throw it out. So, making rotisserie chicken congee. Congee goes by other names, you know, depending on the cuisine, sometimes known as juke, et cetera. Just a rice-based porridge. In the theme of starting with the leftover rice, let's use a rotisserie chicken to its fullest potential. So, first things first, a little aromatic base just to get this broth on its way. Scallion, just nice sections. We don't need perfectly even fine bits. Slicing our ginger, and then garlic. All right, last thing to do before we can start cooking is take apart this chicken. I love rotisserie chicken. It's overcooked chicken in, like, the best possible way. This is, like, very firm, but, like, that meat is tender. Like, it comes right off the bone. We're gonna throw the meat into the porridge itself. The skin, like, that's not stuff that's really gonna come back, but for the broth, it's really, really good. Little neutral oil, just so we can sweat down these aromatics. Moderate heat. By softening them slightly in oil, I'm extracting some of their flavor. And I really want a very modest amount of water. I want the chicken to fit below the surface, but I don't wanna have to reduce this stock down later. It's been about 20 minutes. As you can see, like, we were able to extract a lot from those chicken bones and skin. It's heavily seasoned to begin with. This broth is pretty much, like, seasoned and ready to go. So I'm just straining all those solids out of the broth. So we can bring this right back over the stove with our rice, and we can get this congee cooking. So by starting with cooked rice, probably take 15, maybe 20 minutes to get it to a nice porridge-y consistency. Oh, yeah, we're kind of starting to stick to the bottom of the pot, which tells me it's getting, like, nice and thick. Oh, it's so good. It's just kind of the ultimate comfort food. It's like a warm hug for your mouth. I don't even know that I need all of this. Stir it in there, just let it warm through. As it's sitting, it's kind of setting up, and I just want, like, a little bit more fluidity to it. Beautiful. So I'm putting my scallion and my cilantro on. Just doing a drizzle of toasted sesame oil. I like putting it on raw. It really preserves the aromatics of the sesame. I've got chili crisp. Just adds, like, a little pop of texture, adds a pop of heat, and then a little finishing dose of soy. The soy is obviously giving you an additional layer of seasoning. Some toasted sesame seed. There it is. Oh, my God. Rotisserie chicken congee. It's looking good. Oh, my God. I mean, it's really good. It's really good. Here. Eat that. I just love the degree to which we're able to transform a rotisserie chicken leftover rice into something that feels like should have taken hours. So I'm gonna be making golden fried rice. This version is gonna be influenced by Lucas Sin's golden fried rice, which I had the pleasure of testing a few years ago when it ran in BA. It takes the rice and coats it completely with just egg yolk. So you get literally golden fried rice. I'm kind of looking in the direction of South Asia and sort of incorporating a tadka aromatic spice base with the golden fried rice technique to arrive at something that, I don't know, it's gonna be an adventure, but it made sense at the time that I pitched it. So here we go. Garlic ginger scallion. It's relatively fast to prep, and then you are able to cook it in like seconds. About half that scallion's for the aromatic mixture. Some of it I'm just holding on the side for serving. We're incorporating the egg yolk into the rice mixture, and the egg whites are being cooked separately. So I'm just seasoning the white, and I'm throwing a little bit of oil in there just so that it cooks up just a little bit softer. There's no substitute here for just working this mixture around by hand. Break those clumps up, coat every single grain in egg yolk. I just want this pan to be pretty damn hot before I scramble the whites. Set them aside. Just wanna get it in and get it out. So next step is toasting the spices in ghee. I don't want like quite such insane heat because I wanna be mindful of toasting the spices, but not burning them. I am going to make a tadka base, which is this blend of spices that are bloomed in a hot fat. You can see the mustard seeds popping. That's a good sign. Now I'm gonna do chili flake, a little bit of turmeric. Turn the heat up, and in we go. We wanna bring the rice back to a place of being crispy on the outside, but still kind of chewy and a little bit soft on the inside. So now that the tadka is all mixed into the rice, I'll just take a little bit extra ghee, run it around the outer edge just so it drips down to the bottom and forms that nice layer of fat in between the rice and the skillet. The rice is gonna start to crisp. It's heating through. You wanna just like give it a head start towards that end by not tossing it all the time, just letting it develop a little bit of a crust before you start moving it again. I'm gonna make a little well, drop a little more ghee in it, and I'm gonna fry out my aromatics. Just wanna soften them. Don't want them to be straight up raw. I think we can toss this through now. Egg white can go back in. I didn't wanna overcook the egg white. You saw how fast it cooked, and I don't want it to get all rubbery. I'm gonna do a little bit of soy just for a final seasoning and also just completing the thought about the different influences that work in this dish. Nice. Final topper is some more scallion, and that's it. Golden fried rice. Mm, yeah, I'm into it. Fried rice is like one of the default uses we think of when it comes to leftover rice, but a couple key differences here, couple tweaks in how this dish came together, and it's like really kind of unexpected how transformed it is. So this use of leftover rice is turning it into this crunchy, savory element that's then gonna be used in a salad. It's gonna be a range of colors, textures, flavors, but using that crispy, savory rice as this base element. Crispy tofu rice salad, like with all the other dishes, I could see it, cook them in my mind, you know, no problem. This one is a sort of a hybrid of crispy rice salad developed by Shilpa. Hers uses ground chicken. We're using crispy tofu instead. Gonna start by cutting up our aromatics. So we're not gonna be cooking any of them here. This is gonna be showcasing raw ginger. I'm gonna do a very thin shred here. Really helps make sure you get ginger that's not overly powerful. Gonna slice up the red onion. Again, this is gonna go in raw. Thin slices of Serrano chili. We're gonna put our fish sauce and our sugar in with our chili. It's gonna be part of our dressing. And again, we're just tasting and we're adjusting on the fly. This is food that you can just sort of feel your way through when you're cooking. I like the idea of keeping this vegetarian. Some people like to press their tofu. I like just lightly squeezing out a little bit of the water. I'm gonna do slightly smaller pieces because I want them to incorporate into the salad well. I'm gonna season and toss it with salt and cornstarch as well. Cornstarch loves getting crispy, so it's just gonna give a little bit of texture to this outer kind of shell of the tofu. I like this technique of Shilpa's. She's taking the rice and she's coating it in the curry paste. Coating the rice in this mixture means it's gonna be on every single grain and make sure it suffuses all of the rice. I wanna go moderately hot. The tofu just has a lot of moisture in it. You want an active, crispy sear. I'd say we're somewhere in the five to eight minute range. The hardest part is not messing with it, letting it get crispy, doing its thing. All right, so you see we're getting some really nice, lacy crispiness on the outside. I'm gonna hit it with some of that curry paste and see if I can get them nice and coated. I'm just gonna go ahead and pull it to the side here. Now some more oil and rice can go in. So the goal here is crispiness, right? And to warm the rice through. You know, we've been at this like maybe getting close to five minutes. I'd say two to three more minutes and we should be there. We're starting to get some nice crispiness. Color is deepening and intensifying. So now like this is kind of what we're going for. Nice, big, jagged clumps. In the theme of, you know, make sure all the flavors are kind of dialed up. You can almost treat the herbs like lettuce. I've got the cooked rice. I've got the tofu. I'm gonna throw in a handful of the red onion, ginger, batons, peanuts, a good splash of dressing. Toss it all together in a bowl just as a way to easily adjust seasoning. The rice becomes so dense with like texture and flavor and tofu kind of provides like a little bit of like negative space and something a little bit soft, a little bit yielding in there. So I like serving this like a good handful of lettuce leaves and you just have a riot of flavor and color. I just love that. Shilpa, this is really your dish. I mean, I just kind of like cooked it and put tofu in it instead. It looks really good. You can kind of fill the lettuce with this mixture as you eat it. I like that you caramelized everything. Otherwise I think it would have been too bland otherwise. You get some crispiness from the rice as well. There's a lot of texture in the onions. There's a lot going on. The ginger, to me, the ginger was the eye-opening. Oh my God. I was like, just wait till Shilpa hears that I didn't soak the onion and the ginger. No, it's actually really good. Okay. It's good. Good job, Christopher. 10, 10, can cook. Chorizo and rice stuffed peppers. So rice, it kind of does it all. Rice can almost be like breading. And by breading, I mean, you know, like the thing you put into your meatballs or your meatloaf that isn't meat. And it just kind of like breaks up that space. And often, you know, in a meatball or in a meatloaf, you've got breadcrumb, you've got egg, you've got these elements that serve to bind and to lighten the meat mixture. Rice does very much a similar thing. Today for my peppers, I'm using poblanos and cubanelles. Bell pepper would work. It's a little bit meatier, a little bit less watery. The flavor is just a little bit more complex. Also, I feel like it doesn't collapse quite as readily as a bell pepper does. Bell pepper just kind of like, just kind of wants to like loaf on your sofa. Not today. Okay. So we're gonna do a little spice mixture here. Oregano, cumin, coriander, and then a little bit of smoked paprika. The savory, smoky back note. But if all you did was use chili powder, a lot of these flavors like already in there. Spice mix is done. I'm moving on to onion and garlic. Because it's just gonna go into that meat mixture raw, I wanna dice it fairly fine. This is fresh chorizo, not cured chorizo, which means it's got the texture of a raw sausage. It's been seasoned aggressively with chili powder of one sort or another. So you could use just any old ground meat in here, but I'm looking for something that's got some fat, some richness, some flavor and seasoning of its own. I'm gonna start out with a moderate amount of rice. It's gonna help that mixture kind of set in place. All the spices are going in there. Just gonna throw in a little bit of oil too. I really wanna work this mixture together because the sausage is already seasoned. I don't need to season it as though it was like straight up ground meat, but we still need a little bit of salt for all the other ingredients. Last thing, I'm gonna do a little bit of cilantro just for a little fresh balance. So I'm gonna stuff some of this mixture in, and I really wanna pack it in there. You can really get quite a bit in there as opposed to if you take the top off and kind of stuff it down in there, especially with these longer chilies, it would be miserable trying to pack that mixture down in there. Gonna throw it into a 400 degree oven. Check this in about 25 minutes. Look at the transformation. Mixture is cooked, rice on top, a little bit crispy. I thought we'd go a little crazy and we'd maybe just scatter a little bit of cheese on top and then broil it to finish. So this is a mild cheddar, a slightly softer, higher moisture form of cheddar because it's got good flavor with a little bit of sharpness, but it wants to melt and it wants to take on color. Broiling is gonna melt this cheese very quickly and hopefully get a little bit of color on it. It's like I'm doing this because the last thing you wanna do is wander off and let all your hard work get screwed up, you know? The parchment is starting to burn, which I probably should have thought of, but we're just gonna take it a little further and assume it's not gonna ignite. The hardest part about plain chicken is knowing when to flinch. All right, that's it, I can't take it. It smells like a jalapeno popper. All right, let's see how we did. Mm, the softness of the pepper to the crispy rice kind of interacting. It's really good. Also just the subtle heat from the pepper. There's this unforeseen benefit of the rice, which is that it can get so crispy. Breadcrumbs would never quite get that crispy. The cheese on top too. It gives it just that final blast of richness and savoriness just like a little enchilada sauce, boom, so good. Mango sticky rice is a really iconic dish. This kind of gets you to a similar place in terms of like the world of those flavors. Coconut and mango love each other. Coconut and rice love each other. All those things together just brightened up with a little pop of salt and a little bit of lime and vanilla. They're all just great flavors that mesh really seamlessly. I'm gonna start off by setting up one of these mangoes. Love mango. I mean, I friggin' love mango. Makes like a ripe honeydew look like friggin' open mic night. You know what I mean? Just like, why'd you even show up? I want the flavor of brown sugar, but I don't want like little bits of undissolved sugar in there. So I'm just gonna be a little bit extra and just throw a little water in there and just dissolve it. We're just nuking it. And you see, we have this nice brown syrup. So a little bit of salt in there. And I'm gonna throw a little vanilla in there. A little extract would be totally fine, but bean, it's just so nice. Oh, it really kind of like lifts other flavors up. Little bit of lime zest. This is gonna give us a little bit of brightness of flavor, but without overt acidity. So I can just throw the zest right in there. It's gonna look so good. Toss this together and then move on to the rice. So this dish is very forgiving of whatever proportions you use. I'm gonna start with one can of coconut milk and then I'll do like a couple cups of rice. I can always add a little bit more rice and I can always add more coconut milk too. So I'm gonna do a little bit of vanilla. Scrape these seeds out so they can infuse fully into the pudding. It's gonna put in maybe a quarter cup of sugar. Even though it's a sweet dish, I want a pinch of salt just to bring out all the flavors we've got here. Heat is gonna extract a little bit more of the flavors. It's gonna allow that sort of starchy consistency of the rice to meld a little bit with the coconut milk. All right, so it's really just been five minutes, but you can tell how much the rice has now melded with the coconut milk. This consistency, it's starting to set up even as it cools. You want that creaminess. The mango's been macerating. It's exuded a little bit extra liquid and there you go. Coconut rice pudding with mango. All right. Mm, it's got that sweet, savory aspect and yet it still comes off reading as dessert. The lightness is also what's so interesting too because the rice, as far as pudding-like consistencies goes, it's relatively light. It's there and then it disappears and you just want another bite. So there it is, five simple dishes, all-star leftover rice, and just incorporating so many different fun elements from sweet to savory, taking it to this bold, beautiful, flavor-filled place. We forgot the rice! Oh no. F**k, f**k, f**k!