Dinner Tonight: Shrimp Fried Rice
Sometimes a classic is all you want to eat, and this fried rice recipe, amalgamated from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything and an old copy of Martha Stewart's Everyday Food magazine, is pretty much your straight-up classic fried rice. It hits all the right notes: ginger, carrot, garlic, and scallions. Jean George may have a deconstructed version, but this one does just fine.
The few secrets for good fried rice are to use high heat, minimal oil, and add the rice little by little so that the pan's temperature stays hot. Using leftover rice is best—the dryness facilitates frying—but if you need to cook the rice first, dinner can still be on the table in minutes. Feel free to swap the shrimp with other proteins such as chicken or tofu.
About the author: Blake Royer lives in Brooklyn and spends most of his free time cooking and writing about it here at Serious Eats and on The Paupered Chef. From 9 to 5 weekdays, he works as an assistant book editor in Manhattan.
Shrimp Fried Rice
- serves 2 -
Ingredients
1 egg
2 cups cooked rice
4 scallions, sliced
1 carrot, grated
1 clove garlic, peeled and chopped
1 thumb-sized piece ginger, peeled and grated
10-12 cooked (or uncooked) shrimp, deveined and chopped
2-3 tablespoons soy sauce
Juice from half a lime
Procedure
1. If cooking rice, do so first, then rinse well to cool.
2. In a wok or large nonstick skillet, heat the oil until just before it's about to smoke, then add the ginger, carrot, garlic, and three of the scallions. Stir constantly until just fragrant, only about 15-30 seconds at most.
3. Add the shrimp. If raw, stir until cooked through; if pre-cooked, move on to the next step immediately.
4. Add the rice, handful by handful, stirring constantly to fry.
5. Make a hole in the middle of the rice and crack the egg into it. Stir quickly but gently, incorporating more and more rice until the egg is well-distributed.
6. Add the soy sauce and lime juice, then season with salt and pepper (or more soy sauce). Top with the last scallion.
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8 Comments:
MMMMMM Dinner tonight indeed! I'm goin' for it.
littlesalsi at 6:46PM on 07/29/08
How is your rice such a nice hue without any turmeric or saffron? Or is my computer screen completely buggered?
i8alot at 11:22AM on 07/30/08
i8alot: That might be the hue of the photo -- but the fact that the carrot is grated is apart of it. It leeches out all it's lovely beta-carotene when sauteed in the oil, and the rice picks it right up.
Blake Royer at 3:22PM on 07/30/08
Heat what oil? I don't see oil in the list of ingredients. Am I missing something?
northern virginia at 3:33PM on 07/31/08
Yeah, no oil in ingredients, but oil in recipe....I'm guessing a tablespoon?
amanda0730 at 8:41PM on 08/01/08
amanda0730, Thanks for the assist, but what does it say that the editors apparently don't even read the comments?
northern virginia at 4:22PM on 08/04/08
Another secret of good fried rice is to freeze your cooked rice before using it for fried rice. Thaw the rice before use. A couple of days or weeks in the freezer does wonders to ease the stickiness of the rice in the pan.
Hilfy at 4:41PM on 08/04/08
One thing I don't like is cracking the egg into the rice. It makes the rice mushy again which is what you have tried to avoid. The egg, in Asia, is added as a texture/taste component. Cook it as a flat scramble, then add as strips. Just saw the "whole egg' addition last week somewhere, really have no idea where that comes from.
Best,
Fred
Fred Rickson at 11:05AM on 08/07/08