One of my favorite foods in the world is the Thai Fried Rice from the Old Port Noodle House on Commercial Street here in Portland. When I was hiking the A.T. last summer, it was the only food I really craved, to the extent that my family brought me an order of it when they met us in Vermont. Leftover fried rice with a fresh scrambled egg on it is a peak breakfast food. | | Don’t worry, that’s about it for the pre-recipe personal anecdote, I just wanted to explain how I started this habit of having fried rice for breakfast, and why I eventually decided I had to figure out how to make it myself. I can’t be getting $20 of take out rice every other day, I have camping gear to buy. So this is my version of Thai style fried rice, that you can make in about ten minutes on half a cup of coffee as long as you have a few pantry staples and some leftover plain rice. It’s probably not The Best Fried Rice You’ve Ever Had (or at least I hope not). But it’s quick, and easy, and pretty good. | Step Zero: Time travel | If you want fried rice today, you have to time travel back to yesterday and make some plain long-grain white rice. You simply can’t do this with fresh, hot rice. It’s a law of the universe, unlike the law against time travel which as we all know is more like a guideline. | So set your flux capacitor to yesterday, and then get out your rice cooker. You do have a rice cooker, right? If you don’t: hey, buddy? Who hurt you? Why don’t you love yourself more? You deserve good, easy rice. You are worthy of self care. I’m routinely horrified to find out how many otherwise well-adjusted American adults don’t own a rice cooker. Get a rice cooker, and then go to therapy and figure out why you didn’t already have one. | And while we‘re at it, do you know how to wash rice? I was well into my fourth decade on this earth before my middle son got a job at a Korean-owned restaurant and taught me how to wash rice properly. Maybe everyone else knows, maybe it was just me. If so, that’s ok. To learn anything, you first have to admit your ignorance. And there’s no shame in admitting you’re ignorant in order to learn. I wish I knew sooner, but I’m proud that I am no longer ignorant in this one particular way. So if no one has ever taught you, here you go: | How To Wash Rice: | First wash your hands real good. You’ll see why. Put rice in a bowl (the pot of your rice cooker is perfect if you can take it out). Put the bowl in the sink and run cold water into it, until the rice is well covered. Get your hands right in there and do a little scrubby-scrubby motion with the rice. Rub it between your hands, mix it all around, don’t be delicate. Pretend you’re a toddler at the sand table. Have a good time. Empty out as much water as you can, and then do steps 3 & 4 again. Now the water should be draining more clear. Hold the bowl at an angle and run water into it while you let water also drain out of it, until the water running out is as clear as the water running in.
| The point is to get rid of all the starchy dust on the rice grains, because when they’re cooked that will turn to glue and make the rice stick to your pan like crazy. It’s very annoying. Sometimes you want your rice sticky, but this isn’t one of those times. Wash it real good. | Then cook according to your rice cooker instructions, and put it in the fridge. I like to make three or four cups at a time, which leaves me with several meals worth. Rice won’t keep forever in the fridge but it will keep for a week or so. Don’t leave cooked rice out on the counter any longer than you have to! Trust me on this. | Step One: Assemble the team |  | Not pictured: an egg. You know what an egg looks like right? |
| Here’s what you need: | Cold rice, obviously. Two cups-ish? This recipe is for about two cups, anyway. Feel free to scale up or down. My preference is jasmine rice, but any long grain white rice is fine. Leftover takeout rice? Sure. I’ve even made this with sushi rice, which is more clumpy but also fine. Whatever you have, break it up as much as you can before it goes in the pan. Toasted sesame oil. Any neutral oil will work but I really love sesame oil. I think the oil strongly influences the taste here so I recommend you get some and use it. But you do you! Hot sesame oil. I like it a little spicy, and very specifically I like Kadoya hot sesame oil. I’ve tried other chili oils and they simply don’t taste right to me. But again, this recipe is very flexible. Kadoya is great, but if you don’t like spicy, don’t use anything, or if you like some other hot oil, use that. Oyster sauce. Lee Kum Kee is pretty good, but use whatever you can get. Fish sauce. I’m a known Red Boat partisan. I’ve tried other brands and I do not think they taste good! Again, use what you have but I think Red Boat 40°N is the best, and worth specially ordering. Garlic powder, powdered ginger, and basil. If you want to be fancy, go ahead and use real minced garlic, real grated ginger, and whole basil leaves! See if I care! I’ll do that if I’m making this for dinner with some good homemade char siu in it, or whatever. But powdered is fine! It’ll taste good. Don’t worry about it. Sugar. I use basic-ass white sugar. You want to use honey? Fine! Brown sugar! You go girl. Uhhhhh I don’t know, stevia? That’s between you and your god. Just something sweet that will caramelize when you heat it up. An egg. (Not pictured). Etc: What I’m giving you here is the basic recipe. But of course the beauty of fried rice is it will absorb just about any kind of protein or vegetable you want to put in it. I like onions, bell peppers, and broccoli. You can throw in some pineapple if you’re sassy. For meats, slice up a chicken breast across the grain and cook the pieces quickly in the sesame oil before you add the rice. If you have char siu, that’s fantastic. Tofu? Do it, lady. If you want to tell me a shrimp fried this rice, I’ll believe it. I also like to toss in some sesame seeds, for texture.
| Step Two: Fry the rice | Heat up a pan with a healthy glug of sesame oil and a smaller glug of hot sesame oil. I like to let the rice absorb some oil, so don’t skimp. If you need measurements, I use like, I don’t know, maybe a tablespoon and a half of sesame oil and maybe a teaspoon of hot oil? It doesn’t matter that much. | I like to do this in a cast iron pan. I have a wok but sadly I also have an induction stove, and it just can’t heat a wok properly, so I go for the broadest flat surface I can get. | Heat up the pan on medium until the oil is hot, but nowhere near smoking. Then crumble the rice in, breaking up clumps as much as you can. Stir it all with a spatula until all the rice has absorbed some oil. Then just spread all the rice out and let it cook, and occasionally stir it back up and then spread it out again. You’re trying to give all the rice roughly equal time in contact with the hot pan. |  | The darker flecks are sesame seeds, getting toasty. This is early in the frying process, later it will get clumpy again. |
| Step Three: Make the sauce | While the rice is cooking, I get a little bowl and make the sauce. I never measure anything, but I measured today so I could give you a sense of where to start. But you really can pretty much eyeball all of this, it’ll be fine. So in a little bowl, mix together: | 1 to 2 tablespoons of fish sauce 1 teaspoon or so of oyster sauce 1 teaspoon of sugar About half a teaspoon of garlic powder About half a teaspoon of powdered ginger A teaspoon or less of hot sesame oil A good shake of dried basil. A quarter teaspoon maybe?
| Stir that up good, and don’t forget to keep stirring the rice in the pan occasionally. While you’re at it, in another little bowl, scramble an egg. I like to add salt, black, pepper, and a little more powdered ginger to the egg. |  | The egg and the sauce. Banana for scale. |
| Step Four: Sauce the rice | I’m gonna recommend you turn on your stove vent fan now, if you haven’t already, because this step is stinky. When the rice is heated through and starting to clump up more when you stir it, it’s ready for sauce. Spread the rice out in the pan as best you can and then pour the sauce over it with a nonchalantly elegant flourish. It will hiss and release a great poof of fishy steam, so don’t do this with your face directly over the pan, unless you’re into that kind of thing, you sicko. Stir it all well, until the sauce is evenly absorbed throughout the rice, and then spread out the rice again. | Now your job is to cook the stink off of it. Let it cook for a minute, stir, spread, let it cook for another minute, repeat. Keep doing this and you’ll start to see the bottom layer coming up darker brown as the sugars caramelize. It’ll smell very fishy at first, but soon that will turn to a delightful, nutty smell instead. It may stick to the pan a bit, that’s not a big deal. If you washed the rice well, it should stick a lot less. Just scrape it up the best you can and keep spreading and stirring. | Eventually, once again, the rice will start clumping up when you stir. If if’s a bit more golden than it started and doesn’t smell fishy anymore, then you’re pretty much there. This generally takes maybe five minutes, depending on how hot your pan is. |  | Clumping again. The color doesn’t ever change that much, but you’ll see the difference as you cook it. |
| Step Five: Egg | Make a clear space in the middle of the pan, and put in a drop more sesame oil. Let the oil heat up for a few seconds, then dump the egg in and scramble it with your spatula. |  | HOT EGG-SCRAMBLING ACTION |
| Just before the egg is fully cooked, stir the rice into it. You want the egg and rice kind of sticking together here. Traditional Thai style fried rice usually has the egg completely mixed into the rice before cooking, so the egg bits are quite small. I like some more perceptible scrambled egg, so I cook it on its own a bit first. | Step Six: Eat | That’s pretty much it! Stir until the egg is cooked, then I like to put a final sprinkle of basil on there for the aroma, and serve it. I realize I’ve given you two thousand words here but once you memorize “oyster sauce, fish sauce, sugar, garlic powder, ginger, basil, hot sesame oil” this whole meal takes less than ten minutes to make, and you really don’t need precise quantities of anything. |  | Breakfast of champs. |
| This is, again, the most basic possible version of this recipe. Please add some vegetables to it! Use fresh thai basil leaves if you can, they’re amazing. Lemongrass, dude? Hell yeah. Water chestnuts, dude? HELL YEAH. Banana bread, at work dude? HELL!! YEAH!!! The only limit is your imagination. | If you make this, let me know how it goes. If there’s some obvious improvement that you can’t believe I didn’t think of, leave a comment and share it with the whole class. If there’s some technique I don’t know about, please help me overcome my continuing ignorance. And thanks again for being a paid Tabs subscriber, you literally put this food on my table. And if a subscriber shared this email with you, I think that’s great. This is nothing like what I normally write but nevertheless, please subscribe! Maybe you’ll like that too. | | Bone apple teeth! See you next week. |
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