Easy Fried Rice - Our Simple Formula to use what you have on hand | The Woks of Life

Hi folks, today we're going to show you how to make fried rice. I'm going to show you how to use what you have at home and enable you to make just ad hoc fried rice with what you have at home both in a wok and a skillet. We have a lot of recipes on our blog. We have chicken fried rice, beef fried rice, shrimp fried rice and every one of those recipes have been successfully cooked by many of you at home. But we have gotten a lot of comments and quite a few questions over the years on how to make fried rice and hopefully this video and this post will answer them all. So the general rule of thumb is about four and a half to five cups of cooked rice, about three to four cups of vegetables, plus your aromatics, about a half cup of onions, some scallion, no garlic if you're using it. The meat is about six ounces to eight ounces of cooked meats. The weight of the cooked meats versus raw meat is very different. So raw meat is going to weigh more. You actually want to use closer to like 10 or 12 ounces of raw meat. When you're using raw meat you must sear them first, cook them first and then set them aside and then add them the same time that you would add your cooked meats. We use two eggs. That's the perfect ratio. Today we're using roast pork which we have frozen from a batch of char siu that we made and some shrimp. We had some frozen shrimp. I just blanched them real quick. I thought it would be nice but hey if you've got leftover roast beef, that steak that you didn't finish that night or some let's say roast chicken that you had and you want to pick off the meat, that's perfect for your ad hoc fried rice. An egg is a really important item here. You scramble them up, you cook them just like raw meat, you cook them separately really quick, put it back in your bowl and then you add them towards the end, right before you add the crunchy stuff and the scallions, okay? But you can also beat your raw eggs and then pour them right over the rice and that will coat them, coat your granules of rice and you get kind of a different texture and a different taste and make a golden fried rice. You can do either. So when it comes to vegetables there's really two types. Those vegetables that cook quickly and the ones that take a little bit longer to cook. For example, carrots, broccoli, broccoli stems, gailan stems, Chinese broccoli stems or even American western broccoli stems. Use some frozen vegetables, frozen peas, peas and carrots. You could actually use corn, any frozen vegetable that you like. Now bean sprouts are your sort of your crunch to it and adds like a freshness to your fried rice and that's why we always add them in at the end because they cook very quickly and you still want to retain that little bit of crunch to it to give it texture. You don't have bean sprouts? Use iceberg lettuce. Chop an iceberg lettuce. Chop romaine lettuce. Gives you a freshness. You throw it in at the last minute just until it's wilted so it's still a little crunchy. Now every time you cook your fried rice you're just going to get better and better at it and adjust it the way you like it at home. So now sauce is the next most important thing for fried rice. What we use is a soy sauce blend with dark soy sauce, salt. Remember salt. People don't want to put salt in there but salt is actually very important. You've got a large volume of rice and you need salt and when you mix it a little bit together with a little bit of water because you want to dissolve it and you want to put a little pinch of sugar in there because the sugar kind of balances the saltiness, takes the edge off the saltiness of your sauce. We use turmeric. If you don't like turmeric, I understand. It has a little bit of like a like a curry-like flavor. I think it's very pleasant but it adds supreme color. It adds a nice natural yellow color and with this dark soy sauce balances it gives you a beautiful look for your fried rice. Now if you don't know about light and dark soy sauce you think soy sauce is soy sauce but a light soy sauce is kind of a regular soy sauce. You can see it's a little bit thin. It has a lighter color. That's Chinese soy sauce. This dark soy sauce you can see in here. You see how this coats this bottle? It's very flavorful. It has a deep richness to it and it makes your rice and your other dishes just darkens in a month. Dark soy sauce light soy sauce. How's that? So what types of rice should you use? You want to use long grain jasmine rice as the preferred rice. It's much better, tastier and it actually holds up. Now the other piece is that are you using cooked rice that you cook yourself, fresh or day-old rice. I'm going to show you how to do both. See all the starch in there and then when you cook this rice you put a tad less water in, about 10% less water of what you normally do. I'm just going to put it, I'm just going to eyeball it a little bit for two. If you had a smaller rice cooker you would have, you would have a measurement. Most important thing is you don't want to put too much water in this otherwise you're going to have a real sticky mess in your fried rice. All right, in the rice cooker it goes. I'm going to pour this rice out into a sheet pan where it can air out and just spread it out gently and you can see that we've cooked this with a little bit less water. You're going to let this cool off like this. You see all the steam coming off. Cool off, dry off a little bit. It takes a little bit of time and then you're going to prepare your other ingredients. One and a half cups of uncooked rice make about five cups and here you go. You can see these are nice individual grains of rice. We held back a little bit of water and took this out, the rice out right when it was cooked and cooled it off. All right, so this is day-old rice. Now it's cold because generally you're going to have your cold rice, leftover rice stored in the refrigerator. So I'm going to wet my hands again and you take this rice and you sort of break it up a little bit like this. Just break it up into small chunks. You don't have to break it up everything because in the wok with all the vegetables and the moisture it's going to, the heat and the moisture is going to break up these clumps but you don't want to deal with a chunk like that in your wok. You want to kind of make it into small pieces. All right, to the wok now. Carbon steel wok, best. If you don't have that you can use a saute pan. If you don't have that or you prefer you can use a non-stick pan but we're going to show you how to cook in a wok and not have anything stick. We're also going to show you how to cook in a regular saute pan. All right, we're at the wok. So we have everything at arm's length. At arm's length. Your aromatics first. I kind of group things together. We've got our protein together. We've got the vegetables which the carrots are probably going to go in first along with the broccoli and the mushrooms and we've got some snap peas, the rice and the egg. I have the dry ingredients, the turmeric and salt and MSG and everything together. What I'm going to do is I'm going to mix them all together. Make it easy but I'm going to mix that. Things are going to happen real quick. We're ready to go. Okay. We're going to cook the egg first. Heat up the wok. You want to put a good amount of oil in the wok. Cold oil, hot wok. Keep those eggs moving. Set this aside. Put about a tablespoon of oil and I'm going to put the onion and we're going to use garlic this time because it adds some flavor. I'm going to add in the hard vegetable, the longer cooking vegetable, which is the raw carrot. If you're using frozen carrots, they're generally cooked so you're okay. Get everything in the wok. I'm going to add the pork. Cook the meat. It's cold, it's a little fatty so it's good to add now. I have shrimp, cooked shrimp. I'm not going to add it now because I don't want to overcook the shrimp. Now I'm going to add the rice. Now it's important to make sure you heat the rice up. Lower the heat a little bit if it's too hot. Looks like it's starting to spoil. Now you see what I'm doing here? I'm sort of mushing down these chunks. As it heats up, the rice will start to separate and then other ingredients are going to incorporate. If the rice starts sticking, the key is to use this metal spatula. Don't use any silicone spatulas because you can't get you can't get under the rice and you want to scrape to the bottom. Scrape to the bottom and flip because when you scrape to the bottom and flip, the wok heats, super heats and you want to keep it at a high heat and it'll stop sticking, believe it or not. And we're ready for our sauce. Now some people might say add the sauce right onto the wok, caramelize it. Don't do it because that's just going to burn it, burn your sauce. I'm going to add this here, scoop it a little bit. Actually I like to scoop some rice in there, clean it out. You see these bits here? Just mush them down and continue mixing. Mush them down, continue mixing. Now keep this bowl handy here, right? Because if that's not working, you see this? We're getting a little sticky here. When you do scrape it, scrape to the bottom. Now we still got a few little chunks here. So what I'm going to do is get a little bit of water handy here. If you pour this little bit of water over these chunks like so. Watch this chunk, magically broke up. Little dabs of water. We're going to toss the snap peas in because they cook quick. Egg back in, break them up a little bit. Now I'm going to add my shrimp. I don't want that overcooked. At this point if you had like, let's say, rotisserie chicken, that might be the time to add them. Let me break up these eggs so everybody gets their fair share. Now's the time to add the crunchy stuff. These are the bean sprouts. Crunchy texture to it and the scallions. Add them together. All good. But now is the time you taste it. Taste it before you take it out of the wok. The last thing I'm going to do though is add a little bit of Shaoxing wine. Now that you can add around the edge of the wok. That helps you give it a little bit of wok tang. You can't take the salt out. Now remember, you can always add in its places. Now that's pretty nice fried rice. Here you go. Homemade fried rice. Right at you. Let's go. I mean the color of this rice and, you know, with the turmeric and the flavor that it adds is really nice. I don't know why in the restaurants we use the turmeric. It's really not that expensive if you buy in bulk. Really good. I think the roast pork and char siu is one of my favorites. Of course the shrimp. Delicious. I don't want to be cliched and say this is easy, but it actually is pretty easy. Especially if you practice a little bit. There's a lot of cutting. You know, you gotta mess with the rice a bit, but once you get it down, you're just gonna get better every single time and you're just gonna be, it's gonna be a snap. You're gonna be making bacon fried rice, Chinese sausage fried rice, just a refrigerator clean out fried rice. Kind of like what we did. You know, spice it up with maybe some shrimp like you have freezer or maybe have some crab meat. I'm not sure what that is. It's just a delicious fried rice. Now to the skillet. Yes. All right. Give the wok a rest. Cook it in the pan. And we're going to cook it on the small burner. You want to heat this up. I'm going to cook our eggs first. I'm going to use a metal spatula because if it sticks, I can scrape. There you go. The oil's dancing. All right. That's what you want. You want the oil to dance. Swirl it around the edges because if I get egg around the edges, it's not going to stick. Beat the egg up. There you go. No stick. I'm going to turn this off in fact because I don't want to overcook or scorch my egg. I'm just going to cut it up a little bit. It is done. I'm taking it out because I don't want to get over the... I already scorched it a little bit. Look at that. No stick. Turn it back up. Add a little oil. Tablespoon of oil. Let it dance. This is a simplified version now. This is like I had a couple of pieces of char siu left over and I got an onion and I got some peas and ran out of bean sprouts so I'm going to use some lettuce and some rice. I think that's pretty good because it's been crippled for a while. Add the rice in. Chunks. Mushing the rice down. You know the wok has more room to work with and this is one of the reasons why I cook the onions a little bit less because they're getting cooked now. The wok is faster. The wok is much faster. These chunks are breaking up now. Now this rice is heated through pretty good. You know what we did? We added the pork before the rice last time. I think it's better this way for the skillet though. You can actually do this with the skillet like this. I mixed the sauce last time. You could also just sprinkle it over if you like like this. Put the sauce in here. Now I'm getting a little sticky action here so I'm just gonna... See that? A little sticky action. Just make sure you scrape to the bottom. Fold over. Fold over. This is all about how to fry your rice evenly in the pan. See this? You could scrape that off. As Katelyn pointed out, the wok is faster because the wok has a high sides to it and you can mess with the... mix the rice a little bit more freely without having to worry about it spilling over. But hey, if you don't have a wok you're still eating fried rice tonight. I'm gonna add the eggs now. What about the peas? I'm gonna add the peas too. The peas cook real fast. Here's the lettuce. This is the crunchy stuff. You're just gonna cook it. Mix this just until it wilts and then you're gonna plate it. So I'm gonna turn off the fire and just continue mixing it a little bit more and we're ready to plate. Okay this is your plain one. A little bit less fancy. Less vegetable. Less shrimp. Mama ran out of shrimp. Here it is. Sate pan. Wok. It's nice eggs and nice chunks of char siu in there. Fried rice from the pan. Fried rice from the wok. How's the quality of this one wok versus pan wise? I actually think they're the same. The wok makes it a lot easier to cook. I also forgot to put the Shaoxing wine in here so there's a little bit less bokeh. You had to hit the bokeh with the wok and in the pan you don't really get that much of the searing because it's a heavier bottom wok than the pan. But heck, I'm not disappointed with either one. Very good.