Monday, May 28, 2007

Garlic Fried Rice

I was in Ho Chi Minh City with my older brother when we ate at a restaurant near our hotel. The menu was fraught with options be we went for a simple one that had high potential: Garlic Fried Rice. It was amazing. I believe we ate that dish at that restaurant 3 times. I set about to recreate this delightful meal. Fried rice is probably one of my favorite dish types (some people love dumplings, meat sandwiches, chicken soups, etc.) and this ranks in the top 5 of fried rice dishes I've had (#1 would probably have to be the chicken fried rice I got several days in a row from a cart with a portable wok in Bangkok for 25cents)
Prepare:
1-2cups of cold cooked rice. This is the key to fried rice: the rice cannot be steaming out of the pot. What I always do when I cook rice is cook more than I want, put some in a Tupperware and freeze it right away. When it dethaws, it tastes as good as new.
Lots of garlic. I used about half a thing. Crush it and set it in a convenient locale.Anything else you want: the dish can be only rice, garlic, and egg, or it can have other stuff. I consider it a sin to not cook with onion and chili pepper, so I added that. I also mixed in some fresh chives in the end to give it a moister, more vibrant garlickiness.
Cook:
Heat up your wok to about 80% highest level. Get it nice and hot and drop in a bit of oil, it should heat up right away. Add your crushed garlic and let it fry until it starts browning, then take out half of it and set it aside.
Throw in veggies and about a minute later throw in the rice with a little more oil. Let it fry around, stirring constantly. Add some salt, pepper, a tsp of sugar (it helps, trust me) and some soy sauce and sesame oil if you've got that around. Once the rice is almost complete, crack an egg into the pan.
Keep stirring (you can turn off the heat now) until the rice is completely separate and there are no huge pieces of egg left. At this point you throw in the previously fried garlic, as well as chives or cilantro or whatever else you want.
I ate it with some steamed broccoli, Bok Choy, and cauliflower with a nice cold beer.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

it sounds familiar that you cook rice more than you want, put some in a Tupperware and freeze it right away. ^______^