Bacon Garlic Fried Rice Recipe - Food.com (2024)

FAQs

What is the secret ingredient to restaurant fried rice? ›

Cooking bits of chopped vegetables, seasoning, soy sauce, and oil, seems easy enough. However, when making fried rice at home, there's one ingredient you may be overlooking: Sugar.

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 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.

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.

It is key to the authentic flavor of this dish. Peanut oil. this is another ingredient that adds authentic flavor to this recipe, but if you have a peanut allergy in your household you can substitute canola oil or additional sesame oil for the peanut oil.

That's one of the major differences between how Chinese and Japanese restaurants prepare fried rice. Whereas the former only uses oil, the latter cooks leftover grains with butter (plus soy sauce).

You don't use flavorful sauces

Key amongst these is soy sauce. By adding soy sauce during cooking chefs are adding both salt and umami to the fried rice which, unsurprisingly, greatly improves the dish's overall flavor. Other chefs opt to include fish sauce for similar reasons.

A fresh batch of warm (or even lukewarm) rice will not fry well when it hits the hot pan, and will result in soggy and sticky clumps — no good. So leftover refrigerated rice is ideal!

Should you fry garlic first? ›

Onion is the first to go in the pan because it needs time to become translucent, meaning it's cooked, which takes about 10 minutes. Garlic, on the other hand, cooks quickly and burns easily, so introduce it after the onion is cooked.

Rice for pilafs, fried rice, and salads all benefit from washing. Even when you're steaming rice for dishes like kimbap or sushi, when you want the grains to stick together slightly, you still want to rinse off excess starch, which can result in unpleasantly mushy rice.

In fact, the use of classic Chinese sauces is exactly what makes takeout fried rice so incredibly moreish. Key amongst these is soy sauce. By adding soy sauce during cooking chefs are adding both salt and umami to the fried rice which, unsurprisingly, greatly improves the dish's overall flavor.

The golden yellow color is due to the egg yolk. Golden fried rice is different from classic fried rice. Mix the eggs directly with the rice before frying. If you want your golden fried rice to be more yellow, you can add more egg yolk.

Restaurants will have a long list of ingredients prepped, including stocks, sauces, lots of different spices, dark, light, and regular soy sauce, etc. Many home cooks will skimp/compromise on some of these for convenience, unless it's a special occasion.

In Fried Rice, most quick-service restaurants (QSRs) use long-grain white rice like Basmati, whereas Jasmine Rice is used in Chinese Rice. If you love rice unconditionally, you should definitely try out Fried Rice varieties (available in veg & no-veg) from Hong's Kitchen.