posted by Jaden

In this authentic Chicken Fried Rice recipe, you’ll learn:

• Stir fry secrets to creating flavorful, delicate, authentic Chinese fried rice. No gumminess, no soggy fried rice here!
• Simple marinade for any type of meat to add to fried rice.
• Fried rice variations – make your own family favorite!
• Shortcut to fried rice when you don’t have leftover rice.

Authentic Chinese fried rice is so easy to make….but so easy to get wrong. Oftentimes, those attempting fried rice without learning just a couple simple tricks will end up with a goopy, glue-y, heavy mess. I’ll show you the techniques for a restaurant-worthy, Chinese mom approved, Chicken Fried Rice.

What kind of rice?

Fried rice is made with leftover rice, that’s been refrigerated (though I’ll show you a shortcut later.) Leftover rice has had a chance to dry out a bit – which is a good thing – because we’re adding ingredients and liquids (soy sauce) that will add moisture back into the rice.

If you used freshly cooked, steaming hot rice – and added more liquids and ingredients, it becomes gummy and sticky.

You can use brown rice, jasmine rice (popular in SE Asia), short-grain rice (popular in Korea and Japan), basmati rice, multi-grain rice. It’s up to you – as long as it’s already cooked and previously refrigerated. When we cook rice, we’ll make a double batch, so that I have extra for fried rice later in the week.

Before you’re ready to make the fried rice, wet your hands and use your fingers to break up the rice grains – so that each rice grain is separate. You can do this with a fork, but it’s easier and faster to just use wet fingers to break up the clumps (rice doesn’t stick that well to wet hands.) If you don’t break up the clumps, you’ll have a really tough time in the wok, trying to break them up with a spatula.

Rice shortcut

Shortcut: If you’re hankering for some fried rice, but don’t have leftover rice, do this:

1. Cook rice the normal way, but use 25% less water than normal. No need to be exact, just use a little less water.
2. After rice cooked, open lid immediately, spread out on a baking sheet (or large plate/tray that will fit in freezer.) Let all the steam escape.
3. Place baking sheet in the freezer, freeze for 30 minutes. Rice is now ready to use for fried rice. If rice completely frozen, you might have to let it sit out on counter for a bit to defrost.

The freezer will dry out the rice grains, just enough to make fried rice. It’s not as good as day-old rice, but it will work in a pinch.

Marinate the chicken

Marinate your meat, whether you use chicken breast, chicken thigh — or turkey, pork, beef, shrimp — in a little bit of soy sauce, sesame oil and cornstarch. Optional is to use Chinese rice wine (or dry sherry) in the marinade as well. You can marinate the chicken for as little as 5 minutes or up to overnight in refrigerator.

Just a half-pound of meat, cut in very small pieces, like the size of a small dice, will be enough to feed 4 people. We love using a little bit of meat to feed a lot of mouths in Chinese stir-fries!

Why use cornstarch? The cornstarch thickens up the soy sauce so that it clings to the the meat.

Shortcut: use ground chicken, turkey, pork or beef. No slicing needed!

Other ingredients for Chicken Fried Rice

What else do you have in your refrigerator or freezer? We like using frozen peas or frozen diced mixed vegetables (no need to defrost, just use straight from freezer), chopped green onion and eggs. You can use pretty much any vegetable you want:

• Diced: tomatoes, bell peppers, onion, shallots
• Leftover: cooked broccoli (just give it a rough chop)
• Minced garlic or grated fresh ginger
• Julienned and then roughly chopped: fresh carrots, broccoli stems (peel first), cabbage, Napa cabbage, kale
• Frozen: peas, diced vegetables
• Shortcut item: a bag of broccoli slaw mix
• Eggs

Have all your ingredients ready, at the stove. The stir-frying happens really fast!

Stir Frying Chicken Fried Rice

For the best fried rice, ingredients are added to the wok in batches, stir fried, then removed. They’ll be added back into the wok at a later time.

In this recipe, we’ll cook in this order:

1. Scrambled eggs, then remove
2. Chicken, then remove
3. Rice, then add in the eggs, chicken and peas

Why cook things separately? Because I want my eggs to taste like eggs, and my chicken to be perfectly cooked. If you throw everything in the wok all at once, it will taste like a mish-mash of everything. Also, each ingredient has a different perfect cook time – the eggs will cook faster than the chicken – cooking each item separately ensures that nothing is under or over cooked.

First, the green onion and eggs. Swirl a little oil into a hot wok. Throw in the green onions, give it a quick stir for 10 seconds, then add in two eggs. Scramble and cooked just until set, about a minute. Then scoop out onto a plate. (in the photos, we didn’t use green onion.)

Give the wok a good wipe, no need to rinse.

If you’re using other fresh vegetables that need to be cooked, do that now. Hot wok + a little oil + vegetable. Stir fry until just cooked through.

Cook the chicken

Heat the wok over high heat. When very hot, swirl in cooking oil. When oil hot, add in the marinated chicken.

Use your spatula to spread out the chicken into a single layer in the wok. Use all that surface area! Keeping the chicken in a single layer helps the chicken caramelize and cook nicely. Crowded chicken will result in little browning – the chicken will end up “steaming” instead of browning. Once it’s in the wok, just leave it alone and give it time and space to brown.

Resist the temptation to mess with the chicken – just leave it alone. When you move the chicken around too much, it won’t have time to brown.

Take a peek under piece of chicken. Browned? Now flip, stir and toss!

Then spread out on wok again. Let’s let the other sides of the chicken brown.

Once chicken is nearly cooked through, turn off heat and remove chicken. If the chicken is only 80% of the way cooked through, that’s perfect. We’ll add the chicken back into the wok later to finish cooking. It’s important that you don’t overcook the meat.

Add the rice

Wipe the wok clean, if desired. Heat the wok again, on high and swirl a little more cooking oil in the wok. When hot, add in the rice.

Spread it all around the surface area of the wok, Use all that space! Spreading out the rice will help each grain of rice heat up all the way through. Just let it sit in the wok, undisturbed for a bit. If you keep stirring and tossing the rice, it won’t have a chance to heat through. And, you’ll be breaking the delicate grains of rice, releasing more starch, making a gummy mess. So, it’s best to just let it be for a minute. Then, toss, stir and spread out again to warm through.

Finally, it’s time to add back in the ingredients. Add the chicken:

scrambled eggs:

Frozen peas (they’re still frozen, but will defrost perfectly at the end.)

Give it a toss:

Season with the soy sauce, black pepper and a little oyster sauce, if desired. Oyster sauce will add a little sweet/savory flavor to the fried rice. Personally, I love adding fish sauce, in addition to the soy sauce. It adds a ton of umami flavor without weighing down the fried rice.

Toss, spread the chicken fried rice out over the surface of the wok. The egg will finish setting, the chicken will finish cooking, the peas will defrost, and the liquid seasoning will help re-steam the rice. Toss again, spread out again. This action will also help the fried rice cook/heat through evenly.

Once the chicken fried rice is hot – it’s done!

More Chinese Rice Recipes

Chinese Sausage & Rice Recipe

Cauliflower Fried “Rice” with Chicken Recipe

Pineapple Fried Rice Recipe

I can’t remember the last time I published a post that didn’t include a recipe, but I really felt the need to have a little coffee break and catch up with you guys and let you know what’s happening in the Kitchen Sanctuary household, including some news which is still making me feel rather giddy!

We’re about a week away from the end of the Summer holidays, and I think the kids are ready to go back to school. I usually envisage the summer holidays being balmy days, where Chris and I do a little work, then relax in the garden with a cold beer whilst the kids are splashing around in the paddling pool, or racing around our street on their bikes.

And do you know what? That NEVER happens. We’ve been so busy, that we’ve not even taken the paddling pool out of the shed.

Of the few days we’ve all been at home, Chris and I have been frantically trying to keep up with work (you may have noticed I’ve been posting a lot less these past few weeks), whilst the kids have been flaked out, recovering from whatever trip or event they’ve just got back from.

We opted for a staycation this year. The idea was staying in the UK would be a little more laid back and less expensive, but it didn’t really work out that way.

Is it just me, or are staycations WAY more expensive than you think they’re going to be?

Some of our highlights for August were:

Alton Towers – we spent a fortune on front-of-line passes, and got our brains knocked around on the many rollercoasters (Thirteen was my favourite, Rita made me scream until I ran out of scream, and the fear of Oblivion was way more scary in my mind than in reality). A fun but exhausting day.

A few days in York – the ghost walk was one of my favourite parts, but the Viking centre was a little disappointing for the price and queues. We enjoyed walking along the city walls:

We also stopped off a Billy Bob’s Ice Cream parlour in Skipton. They do THE BEST birthday cake flavour ice cream, and they also have a play barn that the kids love (yes, I had a go on the rope swings after a little persuasion too!!). 

We visited Ironbridge gorge for the first time (even though it’s only 90 minutes away from us) and absolutely LOVED the Victorian town at Blists Hill.

The shops and houses were brilliant – with lots of Victorian-dressed staff teaching candle dipping, brick making and typesetting, plus authentic cottages, pubs (loved the singalong with the piano) and shops to wander around (you could even swap your modern money for shillings!).

No word of a lie, we had the best chips we’ve ever tasted there – fried in beef dripping.
They were so good, we drove all the way back there for another visit a couple of weeks later, and the chip shop was our first stop – ever the greedy foodie….

and yes, we couldn’t resist dressing up ourselves in the dressing up area there:

We visited the Yorkshire Wildlife Park on our way home, which was fantastic. The enclosures were huge and the animals looked happy, playful and content. One of the highlights was seeing the lions – who had been rescued from terribly poor conditions in a zoo in Romania, and now have a gorgeous 7-acre enclosure. They’ve also recently re-homed 4 brown bears in the park, rescuing them from cramped enclosures in a museum in Japan.

The day after we got home, the kids went off to Wales with their grandparents, and Chris and I redecorated and renovated their bedrooms. Four x 16-hour days of painting, sanding, plastering, building and carpet laying, fuelled by lots of coffee. The kids arrived home literally 4 minutes after we sat down on the sofa to relax.

A quick peak of Lewis’s room before and after:

Chris turned 36 a few weeks ago, and one of his favourite pressies was the joke present of a soda stream that I got him. I thought it would be a bit of retro fun that would soon end up in the back of the cupboard, but actually we’ve used it loads (even making our own ginger beer for Dark n’ Stormy cocktails).

Gracey had a birthday too – which involved a sleepover with 5 of her friends, and a hot tub we hired for the occasion. They giggled for 12 hours straight, enjoyed mixing their own mocktails and pretty much covered the house in popcorn. We sent them all home these t-shirts – which I felt was very apt for a bunch of 12 year olds after only a couple of hours sleep.

Chris managed to injure his Achilles last week – to the point that he can hardly walk. That made it really difficult for him when we went to The Big Feastival this past weekend.

I tried to make him stay at home, but he batted my arguments away with his crutches and hobbled through the whole day (love that man!).

I was cooking in the main stage – A cook-off between myself as the first Neff Cookaholic winner, and Jane from The Hedgecombers, who won last year. We battled it out with our own bread pudding recipes (I made a spiced apple bread pudding with browned butter crumble and easy salted caramel, and Jane made a dairy-free bread pudding with coconut and cardamom). The audience voted, and I won! Jane’s was bloomin tasty though – I think it was a close call.

A fantastically fun day, and I went home on a total high! The kid’s loved sitting in the front row, and were so good – shouting for mummy to win. We got to meet Gennaro Contaldo too!

And finally, my last bit of news to finish off our little coffee break (where, let’s face it, I’ve literally just talked at you for the past 15 minutes), is that I got a book deal!!

Page Street publishing approached my a while ago now, and we’ve just signed the contract. Squeeeee!!

I’ll be creating lots of new recipes, and I’ll also be doing the photography for the book.

I’m so excited that I keep breaking out into little jiggle dances in inappropriate places like coffee queues and supermarkets.

I love that they’re letting me do the photography, as it gives me so much more control over how I want the book to look. Lots and lots of work, but I’m not complaining one bit (I’ll try to remain this optimistic on my tenth consecutive day of shooting!).

More to come on the book soon. I’ll keep you updated as things progress.

In the meantime, I’ve got a few more days before the kids go back to school to fit on a bit of picnicing at Rudyard lake on Friday, and some indoor skydiving on Saturday.

Who needs sleep. It’s overrated anyway….

Some of the links in this post may be affiliate links – which means if you buy the product I get a small commission (at no extra cost to you). If you do buy, then thank you! That’s what helps us to keep Kitchen Sanctuary running. The nutritional information provided is approximate and can vary depending on several factors. For more information please see our Terms & Conditions.

Uneori (bine, de foarte multe ori) lucrurile cele mai simple sunt cele mai bune. Si exact asa este reteta de azi – Arrosticini din carne tocata – sau “mici pe bat” cum le spune Sergiu sau “chiftele pe bat”, cum le spune Luca. Am facut reteta asta alaturi de Sergiu si de voi intr-un LIVE pe pagina de Facebook Teo’s Kitchen si ati fost foarte incantati de reteta, foarte multi ne-ati scris ca ati incercat-o si va place mult.

Protection Ritual by Autumn Ravenflower

Source: http://kitchenwitchuk.blogspot.com/2018/05/protection-ritual-by-autumn-ravenflower.html

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