$333 vs $20 Fried Rice: Pro Chef & Home Cook Swap Ingredients | Epicurious

How do they do that? What kind of forearm strength do they have? Oh my God. Hi, I'm Eric, I'm a professional chef and these are my $333 fried rice ingredients. Hey, I'm Joe, I'm a home cook and these are my $20 fried rice ingredients. I don't think the other tray is gonna be as cool. Oh, that was my grandmother's chicken. Okay, these are the most basic building blocks of fried rice, but from this we will do something magical. Oh, this is like the same dish. I'm assuming this probably costs about $20 too. So I was planning on making a mushroom fried rice with crispy bone marrow and roasted ribeye cap. Just like mama used to make. This meat, oh. Add a really beautiful American Wagyu ribeye cap. Maybe it's deer. Add some beautiful mushrooms, wood ears and shiitakes. I don't know what that is. We were going to smoke some bone marrow and tempura fry them as a crispy garnish. Are these bones? I don't wanna touch that. It's gonna make a really beautiful op-pov sauce. Add some barrel-aged Kishibori soy sauce and we had some small batch bourbon. What? That's for later. With Joe's recipe, we have simpler ingredients for sure. Things that you can find at the grocery store but we can definitely do a lot with them. I would surmise this whole thing costs $21. Yosh, yes, nice. $297. Oh my God. Should've dreamed bigger. In my hands, I hold Chef Eric's recipe book. Look how many instructions though. I've never seen this many instructions. We are going to make this really great fried rice, confit the mushrooms, stir fry them together, brown butter base, this ribeye cap, slice it on top and a sauce op-pov, so. All right, I got a lot to do and it looks like I'm starting with the rice, so let's go. So Joe, you're gonna be working with jasmine rice today. Jasmine is a medium to long grain rice, has less of the amylopectin that makes it really sticky. So this makes it really perfect for fried rice as long as you do the washing and cooking steps properly. If you told me this was starch on the rice that was coming off, I would not believe you. I know that's a lie. You're going to wash the rice and then strain the water out until the water runs pretty clear. That way you'll have removed a lot of the excess starch. Okay, that's it. I'm not rinsing rice anymore, I'm done. It seems like Joe is trying to make some chicken fried rice with peas and carrots. Delicious, obviously, but simple. I'm gonna do something a little different. Garlic fried rice with chicken skin crumble, soy cured egg yolk, and grilled chicken paillard as well on top. So we're gonna start off with the rice. This is ready rice, jasmine rice. I'm going to prepare this rice according to instructions. Squeeze pouch to separate rice and then 90 seconds in our trusty microwave. I have a nice little rice cooker. It's a Neuro Fuzzy, my favorite brand. You're going to cook it in a ratio of one and a quarter to one. And now I got some salt. Now all I have to do is a simple job of hitting cooking. And then after it's cooked, you're going to transfer it to a tray to chill. I'm just gonna give it a light spray of oil to keep the grains separate and from clumping as much as possible. And then this is gonna move to the fridge. You want it to crystallize. You want the starches to harden. That's what's going to keep your fried rice really nice and fluffy later. So this, I'm going to turn into rice puffs. So I'm gonna microwave it according to instructions. I'm going to overcook it in some more water. Cook the hell out of it because we're going to puree it later. I have very overcooked rice here, which is exactly what I wanted. And I'm gonna blend this now. When you blend hot things, please be careful. They can explode. I'm going to pour a little bit out onto my Silpat. You want a thin layer. Then this is a dehydrator. It basically circulates air at a not too hot temperature, generally below 200 degrees Fahrenheit. I'm gonna let this dehydrate until it turns into kind of a leathery, starchy, unappetizing looking thing. Even though it looks really dry, there is still a little bit of water in here and I'm going to break it into little pieces. And then when we fry it, the water is going to expand rapidly and it should puff up beautifully. And these are gonna add a really nice textural component to everything. Always season food at the fryer. These look great. Chef Eric says once the frying starts, everything happens really quick. So I'm gonna get all of my vegetables prepped. If you are not ready, you're going to, as we say, go down. I'm gonna start with the wood ear mushrooms, which are these right here. I've never heard of these. They don't have a ton of flavor, but they have this really awesome texture. They're crispy, crunchy, kind of bouncy as well. These are shiitake mushrooms. I'm just gonna cut these into quarters. I'm putting these in a separate dish because I'm doing something special with them. We've got some cow horn peppers here as well. They're called cow horn peppers because they look like cow horns. A very popular ingredient in Chinese cooking as well. They're kind of like a medium heat. That's a lot spicier. I was told these were mild, but I'm done, I think. I think this is enough pepper. Yeah, I'm gonna kill somebody with all this. So Joe gave me some eggs, almost a requirement in fried rice, but I wanna do something a little more fancy, if you will. We're gonna garnish our fried rice with a lovely soy-cured egg yolk. So curing in everything from cooking to concrete means extracting water out of it. So what we're gonna do with the egg yolks is place them into a really salty soy sauce brine. So I'm going to separate them, gently lifting, and then the salt will try to achieve equilibrium. It'll make the eggs firm up and textured. That way we can pop it and it'll run and mix beautifully into our fried rice. And I'm gonna save the egg whites. We're gonna scramble these up and add them to our fried rice. Egg white fried rice, really good. All right, I'm all scrubbed in. We're gonna be operating on this beautiful hunk of meat. So Joe, you're gonna be working with rib eye cap, AKA calote, AKA beef deckle, AKA spinalis dorsi. You're going to clean it up, just some of the excess sinew and some of the excess fat. If you can get a butcher to get it for you, this is like the chef's cut. They call it butcher's butter sometimes. But we are saving these hunks of fat and they are gonna be put into use later on in this dish. Then you're gonna cut the calote into kind of phone-sized portions. I think this would be a Samsung Galaxy 7 Pro. All the sinew you clean up, all the excess fat. We're just gonna grind it up to increase the surface area by a great deal. There's something extremely satisfying about every part of this. So you're not going to get a ton of fat, but it's still worth using. You can turn it into a crackling of sorts, which we're gonna garnish the fried rice with. Oh, hey, I got my bowl of beef fat and sinew here that I've ground up. I'm going to be making some beef cracklings. In order to do that, I need this beef tallow. I don't know what this is. Tallow is rendered beef fat. It's a wonderful fat to cook with. It is very high in saturated fat. So eat in moderation. My tallow is nice and melted, and that means that it's time to put my fat into there. You want to go pretty slow with it because it takes time to get all the water out of all those little bits. It's been 25 to 30 minutes. I've watched a full episode of Two Broke Girls. It's ready to go. You're gonna get beef tallow with extra beefy flavor. Beef squared, potentially even cubed. Okay, we got some fat fried fat. That's gonna make my fried rice even better than it already was gonna be, which is great. Next up, I'm gonna confit some mushrooms. I don't know what it means, but judging by the things in front of me, it's mushrooms cooked in beef fat. You're probably like, that's not very healthy. Don't worry. There we go. This is thyme, and I'm going to add my garlic. You gotta cover that up. And then I'm gonna cook this at 250 for at least an hour until they're nice and tender, and then they will be a confit. All right, so Joe was kind enough to give me scallions. Obviously, you could just stir fry them, but let's do something a little more fun. I think I'm gonna turn the dark green parts into a scallion powder, which we're going to dust on top of our fried rice, and then we're gonna quickly dehydrate these in Chef Mike. So we're going to microwave in like 20-second intervals. We're gonna keep doing this until they turn dry. Okay, so two minutes worth. They're getting papery. I'm gonna wipe this plate dry and just microwave them on the plate. I think it's been about four minutes total, and you hear that, like paper. All right, I'm gonna make sure this is super dry, which it is. Any errant water here is going to drink up all this scallion powder we worked for. Let's take it home with a mortar and pestle. Okay. It's time to deal with these bones. They're not just for show. I'm gonna be using the marrow. Bone marrow is within the femur. It has a lot of fat. It's squishy. You're going to soak the bones as long as you can in salted ice water. Just wanna extract a little bit of the impurities and some of the blood. All right, those are gonna sit in the fridge and soak until they are tender enough to take the marrow out. After that, you're going to pop the marrow out. It should come out in one piece. I mean, I think I did it perfect. All right, this one didn't come out quite up to my standards. Then you're going to cold smoke it. Yeah, man. You ever look at your hands and be like, I'm controlling these things with my mind, man. I got my bones all stoned and now I'm going to bring it over to the fridge and let it chill out for a minute. Here we are. Got some nice looking chilled bone marrow. It's nice and firm. And then after that, you're going to dice it. It's hard to handle unless it's very cold. All right, bone marrow's chopped up. I'm getting pretty tired. And then you're going to tempura fry it. Let's go. Here is some flour. This is corn starch. We're gonna add half a cup. And this is what the sparkling water is for. The sparkling water is going to add effervescence, bubbliness. It's going to keep your batter really nice and airy. Is this a duck egg? It maybe has more fat. As much fat as we can put into this fried rice, that's what we're gonna do. I'm going to mix up this batter. I don't want to over mix it. So I mix it until it's mixed. And if it's mixed and I'm still mixing, I'm over mixing. Stop. I'm done. I'm going to use this perfectly mixed batter to fry up my bone marrow. I feel a little nervous about what I'm doing. Mostly that I feel it's not correct, but also the fryer is just a scary thing to me. All right, we're going to give that a minute to be dangerously scalding, boiling, bubbling hot. This scares me. Okay, here's round one. I learned what not to do, which I think is to put them all in one big clump in the middle. I'm just as scared as the first time, even though I've already been through it. Now I got to shake the basket so that these don't stick to anything. And also to increase the splash risk. All right, let's take a look. Oh, baby. I'm going to season this with lots and lots of salt. I'm going to burn my mouth, but I don't even care. That is so good. Jill gave me some carrots. Peas and carrots and fried rice, classic Chinese takeout. I want to do something different though. I want to juice them and I'm going to reduce it down with some hot sauce to make a glaze for our chicken later. And then I have all this pulp in here. Carrot pulp normally goes right into your garbage, right into your compost bin, but much like anything else, you can pop it right in the dehydrator and make yourself some crispy, crunchy carrot pulp. So I have a chicken breast here with the skin on. I'm going to take the skin off and we are not going to throw it away. We're going to make this chicken skin crumble. Parchment on top. And then I'm going to use a wire rack here turned upside down, just so we get a nice even surface area and I'm going to bake it. All right, I'm going to butterfly this chicken breast, opening it up like a book so that it cooks more evenly. And then I'm going to pound it out a little bit to make it really thin for a technique called chicken paillard. So I'm going to add my fresh carrot juice, soy sauce, some of this sriracha, bit of salt, black pepper, and little bit of oil. That'll help with sticking because we're going to grill this later. Maybe you've been waiting for fried rice, but that's not what time it is. It's steak time. And I got that right here. Look at this beauty. We've got some salt on there, some pepper. I need to do both sides. So you're going to bring up a carbon steel pan to medium high heat. Sear it on each side just for a couple minutes until you get some light browning. So I'm going to add this nice little chunk of butter in. That butter is going to brown. It's going to get really foamy and nutty and aromatic. Then you're going to add some thyme and garlic to that. Now I'm going to baste my steak. This is what you see them doing on fancy cooking shows. As you brown butter baste it, you're going to watch it turn into this beautiful mahogany color and it's going to be infused with all those herbs and garlic and brown butter. And now we're going to put the most beautiful steak I've ever made. Look at that thing. Oh my God. So to make this chicken skin crumble, we have our crispy chicken skin, this really nice, beautiful golden brown glass chip. Shatters like glass. I'm going to add garlic chips, crispy rice puffs, and crispy dehydrated carrot pulp. I'm going to season this up with a little bit of salt and that's pretty much it. Look at that, huh? That looks nice. It's the moment I've all been waiting for. I'm going to make something called an au poivre sauce. So steak au poivre, very classic French recipe. You would coat steaks in black peppercorns and make a really intense peppery sauce. The key thing to remember here is that black pepper plus beef is magic. First thing I'm going to do is get rid of this butter from the steak that I just made perfectly. That pan that you cooked the steak in, it has lots of little brown, tasty, beefy bits in there. So I'm going to deglaze the pan with your bourbon. So turn your burner off first, add the bourbon to it, then turn the flame back on. There is going to be some fire. Please be careful. Get ready for this. Woo-hoo-hoo-hoo! Now I'm a chef. Wow. All right, it's not on fire anymore. I'll be honest, I'm kind of losing interest. This is $100,000 worth of soy sauce just right there. I've got some butter right here. And I'm going to use, it's an eight peppercorn blend. If you're using seven peppercorns, six peppercorns, why don't you get out of here? I'm just going to mash them up, get them nice and fine. All right. Damn, this smells good. So I have my butterflied chicken paillard breast here. So I'm going to let it mark on one side, cook, flip it. Oh, I probably pounded it too hard. Brush the grilled side with some glaze, and then I'm going to continue to flip it continuously and to allow that glaze to caramelize because there's a lot of sugar in here and it's very flavorsome. All right, that'll do. This is it, baby, homestretch. Look at this. I got my big wok. I got a bunch of vegetables. I got my rice. I'm ready to fry some rice. This is fried rice that we're doing. First, I'm going to start off with a little bit of beef tallow that I cooked my mushrooms in. Going to get the pan hot. Chef Eric said this part is going to be quick and intense. So I'm ready. First up, these are duck eggs. Quick scramble. They should be just barely set. Then you're going to add your wood ear mushrooms, your scallions, toss, toss, toss. Corn, just a touch of these insanely hot peppers. Here go my mushrooms. Just a little bit of salt. Don't forget, this is fried rice we're making. So I'm going to put some rice in there. Going to hit it with a little MSG. Don't be scared of this stuff. MSG is your friend, especially for fried rice. Last step, we're going to put some very expensive soy sauce in there and we mix, mix, mix. You're constantly tossing it, making dramatic leaps of rice and ingredients in the air. Oh my God. I don't know how they do that. This is way too heavy. If you've seen pros make fried rice, it is almost nonstop motion. That is the key to great fried rice. You're constantly tossing it, emulsifying the ingredients together, distributing seasoning and heat throughout. Don't tell Chef Eric about this. I think I'm done. So I'm going to cook in this pan. Looks like a Teflon nonstick pan, probably something you would have at home. And then this is garlic fried rice, so a lot of garlic. My light green scallion and whites. Then we're going egg whites. I like egg whites in fried rice. This ready rice, ready to go into the pot. I think I need a little bit more oil here. You want to be able to see a shine on the rice and some salt. If I was using a wok, I would be tossing this constantly over high heat, but I need to keep returning this pan to the burner because it's not quite hot enough. I'm going to go in with peas. I'm going to add some soy sauce for color, umami. And I'm just looking for a light brown, even color. I'm going to keep tossing it. And the finishing touch, blowtorch. This looks crazy and stupid and totally excessive, but it does serve a purpose. Great fried rice has that wok hay flavor, which literally translates to breath of the wok. What it really is is such high heat that all the fats are combusting and it has that kind of light charred, smoky flavor. That's really difficult to replicate at home, unless you have a super-sized rocket ship burner, but you can replicate it a little bit with a blowtorch. All right. We got to plate this right now because fried rice is best as soon as it comes out of the pan. Oh, look at that steak. My goodness. All right. I'm going to put on my olive oil sauce. Soy cured egg yolk. I'm just going to sprinkle a little horseradish on there. All this work, this chicken skin crumble. Now, these are my cracklings. Then I got my tempura battered bone marrow. How'd these come out? I'm the greatest chef alive. Finally, scallion powder. Are we ready? Look at that nicely curled scallion. All right. Here it is. Mushroom fried rice with crispy bone marrow and a ribeye cap. This is my fried rice. I hope Joe likes it. I'm very excited to see how he did with my recipe. Chef Eric, what's up, man? How you doing? How's it going? Good day? Yeah, it was so fun. What about you? Yeah, it was good, man. Was it complicated? I would have liked it if the tray was a little more complicated. I think it came out pretty interesting. Okay. I want to see it. All right. Let's do it. Oh, nice. Oh, wow. Okay. All right. Wow. None of this is my stuff. Different color schemes here. It was a very man-tastic fried rice. It was, yeah. With the whiskey, the beef. A little bit of everything. I'm going to try the steak on its own. Mmm. That's really good. Yeah? Yeah, man. All right. The sauce is great. Cooked very nicely. You nailed it. The mushrooms came out really well. A lot of beef fat in there. There's beef fat in there. Yeah, there's beef fat all over the place. I'm almost nervous to eat a piece of bone marrow this big, but let's do it. I'm not going to lie. I've been snacking on the bone marrow since I made it. The tempura came out really well. I'm really happy with this rice. I can't believe I made it. It was really great. I got to try this. All right. Let's do it. I'm very excited for this. All right. We're going to break this yolk up, get the crispy bits, get some peas. The chicken crumble came out nice. That's fantastic. The chicken's perfectly cooked. Just everything is, like, all the flavors go together really well. The fried rice base on it is something that's very approachable, but, like, all the texture. It feels fancy, but it also feels like home cooking. It doesn't feel inaccessible. It's recognizable as fried rice, which is important. No, this is almost exactly what I was going to do also, so. Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, damn. Carrot pulp. Same, same. I love juice and carrots. Great minds.