Transcript for:
Quick Chicken Fried Rice Recipe

Hey everyone, it's Kenji and I'm gonna fry some rice. I'm using leftover chicken that I did on my rotisserie. You can just use leftover rotisserie, you can use rotisserie chicken from the supermarket. Chicken breasts, like this is like half a breast just chopped up.

And we're doing chicken fried rice with egg, scallions and some frozen peas. And then this is leftover rice from one of those Seattle teriyaki joints. So it actually already has some, actually already has a little bit of like teriyaki sauce on it, so maybe that'll actually give it a little more flavor. This is day old.

Here's a trick I learned from Wang Gang. If you don't follow Wang Gang, he's a Sichuan chef who's great. But add a little bit of cornstarch to it, and then break up the rice with your fingers. And that'll actually help the rice grains stay a little more separated and cook a little more easily. Got it?

Just like that. Just want to break the rice up. You can make...

Fried rice with very fresh rice. And then, you know, the testing I've done, and I'll link to an article I've written about this, but in the testing I've done, fried rice works best with either freshly cooked rice or rice that has sat in the fridge overnight, preferably uncovered, but it doesn't matter too much. Rice that has sat in the fridge overnight.

What doesn't work too well is if you take rice that's like maybe 45 minutes old or so. because the grains start to stick together and that's where you run into problems and it just kind of turns mushy. So you really want either very freshly cooked rice or rice that is day old. All right, so I'm going to take my wok, rub a little film of oil into it, not a ton right now. This is another trick I do.

So I rub a film of oil into the wok and that's going to be sort of our temperature gauge. So as soon as that oil is smoking hot, I know that the wok is hot enough that I could add the rest of my oil. If you try and add...

all your oil at the beginning and then heat your wok till it gets smoking hot. The oil burns and it tastes bad and it just doesn't work out so well. So you want to do it in kind of two separate phases.

So first we're going to do the egg, a little pinch of salt. Let's do a little touch of MSG, a little bit of white pepper. Alright, our wok is smoking hot.

Now we're going to add quite a bit of oil for this egg. Okay, get it in there. Alright, and that egg is done.

Get it out for now. Alright, let our wok reheat one more time. Now we're going to do everything else, basically. Smoking hot. Get our oil in.

Couple tablespoons. Get our rice in. So if you have an outdoor burner you can get that wok hay flavor, you know the smoky flavor. If you don't and you want to do my little torch trick, you can get a torch like this. Light it up, point it in there while you cook and what happens is the oil sort of vaporizes and singes and leaves kind of these sooty deposits similar to what happens when you cook a hamburger on a grill and the fat kind of drips in and the flames come up and it gives you that kind of smoky grilled flavor that's part of what the flavor of wok hay is all right some of that going on Push that up the side.

I'm gonna get my scallions and my chicken in there. A little stir. Look at my peas. These are not actually even defrosted yet.

They're so small they're gonna defrost in no time. I really like frozen peas and fried rice. I mean I don't always do it but I love it. My daughter loves it so I just do it. You can, you know, you can do whatever you want.

If you don't want to, if you wanted to add other vegetables, say like, you know, chopped carrots or chilies, onions, celery, what you would do is stir fry all that before you add, before you put in the rice. So stir fry all of it, take it out of the wok, then stir fry the rice and add those, those pre-stir fried vegetables back in at the same time that I added that sort of chicken and scallion mixture. All right, now we just need some seasoning.

So a bit of salt. I'll do a dash of soy sauce. Soy sauce around the side of the pan so that it kind of burns and doesn't quickly evaporates.

A little MSG. We'll get our egg back on top and a little white pepper too. I'm just gonna Break that egg in. There you go, some very simple Chicken and egg fried rice made mainly from leftovers and, you know, leftovers and frozen stuff.

A couple of other things. Easy, right? Fried rice is easy.

How's that look to you? I think it looks pretty swell. Alright. Tastes pretty good too. Here, have one.

You want a little bit? You want a little bit? Hmm, a little smoky. Ice creams are tender. No big sticky clumps.

Sit. Alright, shabu! Sit.

Good girl. There we go. Easy, easy chicken fried rice. Alright, guys, gals, non-binary pals, I'll see you next time. Bye-bye.