EASY 20-Minute Fried Rice Recipe - I Heart Naptime (2024)

FAQs

How to make fried rice 5 steps? ›

Season With Soy Sauce, Rice Vinegar, and Sesame Oil

While not every recipe calls for this fried rice trifecta, many of our favorites do. Why? Soy sauce is the salt element, rice vinegar gives the dish a touch of brightness, and sesame oil lends an utterly delicious, toasty note.

To give your dish that signature fried rice taste, you'll need to drizzle in sesame oil and soy sauce, but feel free to use as much or as little as you wish. You can even mix in things like garlic powder, ginger root, or Sriracha sauce and chili pepper for a bit of a kick.

Though you might not be able to pinpoint the sweet inclusion while digging into a take-out box and piling spoonsful of fluffy rice into your mouth, the addition of sugar is a common culinary technique practiced by restaurants.

To get the best flavour, the vinegar needs to be folded into the rice while it is still warm. As you are mixing the rice and vinegar together, use a fan to cool the rice and remove the moisture.

Yes, you can use lemon juice instead of vinegar in a fried rice recipe, and it can add a bright and tangy flavor to the dish.

The answer: high heat, expert tosses, and something known as 'wok hei. ' As J. Kenji López-Alt writes for Serious Eats, expert cooking with a wok (and the gas range it requires) is one of the main reasons that fried rice from a Chinese restaurant tastes so much better than what you can make at home.

To get restaurant-quality fried rice at home, it's essential to use aromatics, a group of vegetables and herbs that are so named because they lend your dish a distinct aroma. Common aromatics that are used to flavor fried rice are onion, garlic, ginger, lemongrass, and red peppers.

This is because the sugar caramelizes the rice, which gives it that light hue you often find on fried rice made in restaurants. Sugar will also offer a nice contrast to the saltiness in your homemade fried rice, which helps replicate the flavor of takeout.

The usage of rice

But in Chinese rice, it is suggested to use leftover cooked rice to avoid the rice from being sticky. In Fried Rice, most quick-service restaurants (QSRs) use long-grain white rice like Basmati, whereas Jasmine Rice is used in Chinese Rice.

Do Chinese restaurants wash their rice? ›

"They don't really wash their rice because what they want to do is retain the [starch] that is essential in making sure the dish ends up tasting creamy. "Whereas in Asian cultures, the tendency is always to wash the rice," Tan says.

There are generally four different methods for cooking rice: steaming, boiling, pilaf and risotto, all of which produce very different results. For many cultures, cooking rice is a sacred and daily ritual. And when it comes to cooking rice, everyone has their own personal preference.