07.02.08

Fried Rice

Posted in cooking, food, kitchen learning at 9:33 pm by Hanne Blank

The first time I encountered fried rice outside the confines of a Chinese restaurant, it was when my friend C. destroyed my wok with it.

We were undergraduates, and thus you may take it as writ that we were callow and just a bit reckless.  This very much included an attitude toward cookery that was equal parts ignorance, ineptitude, and an unshakable faith that just about anything could be considered edible if one put enough soy sauce, ketchup, or cheese on it.

Thus did my friend C. attempt to make fried rice in the wok I had only recently bought for myself in Boston Chinatown, in the kitchen of an apartment I was renting in a neighborhood that still had a long time to wait for its first brush with gentrification, during a weekend when he was apartment-sitting for me while I was away.  When I returned home, my wok was crusted with lumps of carbon black in spots, shining steely-grey in others. C. apologized, and said he’d had to take a break from scouring the burned stuff off, but he’d give it another scrub in a bit.

C. had, he explained, been making fried rice.   For some reason, it hadn’t worked.  He’d put oil into the wok, and then dry, uncooked rice.  He heated it until the oil smoked, but it didn’t seem to be working.  He turned down the heat, added a liberal quantity of soy sauce, and continued cooking, sure that if he just cooked it long enough, the rice and oil would somehow magically transform into something fragrant and savory.

I suppose “fragrant” is one word you could use to describe the scent of carbonized grain.  But no vat at the Kikkoman factory could have contained enough soy sauce to render it savory.

My wok never did recover completely.  No matter how C. scrubbed it, or how I did, it never heated evenly afterward.  The black burned patches thickened as other foods I tried cooking in the wok clung to the speckles of char I hadn’t been able to get off, burned faster than I could scrape them away, then liberated themselves into my dinner in gritty black flakes like the Devil’s dandruff.  Eventually I threw the wok away.

New woks solved the problem of uneven heating and charcoal specks.  It took quite a bit longer, however, for me to become brave enough to attempt cooking my own fried rice.   For years I read recipes for various versions, all of which seemed simple enough, and educated me amply on just where my friend C. had gone wrong (namely, right at the beginning: fried rice is made with rice that has already been cooked).  I learned to cook dozens of other Chinese dishes with success, from simple stir-fried greens to homemade har gao (translucent shrimp dumplings), ji gai bao (paper wrapped chicken), and tea-smoked duck.  I learned to make my own Sichuan-style pickles, Cantonese master sauces, and make enough jiao zi (potstickers) to feed a houseful of guests.  Yet somewhere in the back of my brain I felt certain that fried rice had to be some sort of trick culinary question, that the instant I attempted it, some cosmic force of culinary retribution — the souls of a thousand Ming Dynasty epicures rising up to smite my round-eyed white bone demon kind for the mere existence of chop suey — would incinerate my wok on the spot, leaving me scraping away yet again at clots of carbohydrate as thoroughly carbonized as Han Solo.

In the end I wound up making fried rice by accident.  I suspect that this may well have been how the dish began.  In Chinese cooking, fried rice is not something one sets out to make, after all.  It is the Chinese equivalent of making hash, a thing one does not merely with leftovers, but with the kinds of odds and sods of food that aren’t enough for even a full small serving, but are still sufficiently more than a mouthful that you’d feel wasteful throwing them away.  It’s the thing you do when you have half an onion, and three tablespoons of peas, a handful of cooked asparagus stalks from the other night, two handfuls of spinach leaves, a third of a cup of leftover stirfried bok choy, the wings left over from that roasted chicken, and the leftover rice from two nights ago.  Which was more or less what I had on hand when it dawned on me that if I threw it all into a hot wok with some garlic and ginger and a little oil, and seasoned it with a dribble of oyster sauce and a slosh of soy sauce and a liberal drizzle of sesame oil, it’d probably taste pretty good.

What it tasted like, in point of fact, was fried rice.  Because it was.  Really good fried rice, in fact, with a distinctly more varied and vegetal tone than any fried rice I’d ever eaten in a restaurant.  The various seasonings I’d used on the components when I cooked them the first time — a hit of lemon pepper on the asparagus, a bit of sage and celery seed in the chicken — flirted with the garlic and onion and ginger, and mingled surprisingly smoothly with the oyster sauce and soy and sesame.  Thrilled, I devoured the whole dish, and would’ve eaten more had there been any.

Since then fried rice has entered regular rotation in my kitchen.  Any time I become aware that I have completely run out of empty plastic food storage containers in the smallest sizes because they are all in a ziggurat in the fridge, full of dribs and drabs of things, there is sure to be fried rice for supper.  Fried rice is pretty much endlessly forgiving.  I have yet to meet the savory leftover it could not accomodate — although it is true that I do not (due to casein allergy) eat dairy products, so I haven’t attempted to add anything silly, like scalloped potatoes or macaroni and cheese.  I have made fried rice with cabbage, with corned beef, and with cauliflower, although not, it must be admitted, simultaneously.  I’ve made it with freshly shelled peas (I only had a handful to work with).  I’ve made it with the tail end of a bag of frozen okra.  Some have been better than others, I grant you.  But they’ve all been pretty good.

There isn’t much to the process of making fried rice.  As with all Chinese cooking, you have to prepare all your ingredients in advance of heating the wok, chopping what needs chopping, mincing what needs mincing, right down to mincing your ginger and garlic, scrambling and shredding your egg(s) if you’re using them, sauteeing your half an onion or your three elderly mushrooms or whatever raw vegetables you’re trying to use up, and mixing your preferred blend of oyster sauce and soy sauce and sesame oil with a little bit of water or broth in a small bowl or cup so it is ready to add when the time comes. (Don’t ask me how much of whatever you are supposed to use.  You’re supposed to use enough.  Not too much.  As much as you like.  Do I look like a mind reader?  They’re your leftovers and it’s your tastebuds. You figure it out.] Break up your leftover rice so that it isn’t stuck together in chunks.  If you want to and you have one, slice up a green onion so you can sprinkle it over the top when it’s all done cooking.

To put it all together, heat the wok until it is very hot indeed, and add a healthy skosh of oil, coating the inside of the wok as well as you can.  Add your ginger and garlic and stir, and as soon as the fragrance blooms, add the rice and toss it well, distributing the oil, ginger, and garlic thoroughly.  Cook, stirring frequently, until the rice begins to color a little in a few places — then start adding your other ingredients, combining each one into the rice as you stir-fry.  At the end, pour in your sauce, stir to combine, and let it all stand for a minute before you serve.

Okay, so maybe fried rice takes a little practice.  Most of the alchemical cookery that turns scraps into meals does.  After all, any fool with a decent cookbook and the willingness to follow directions can turn an ample supply of raw ingredients into a passable dinner.  It takes a different approach entirely, and a whole lot more fluency in the kitchen, to take whatever scraps fall to hand and turn them into something tasty, nourishing, and satisfying.  It’s worth the effort.

Just please, cook the rice first.

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