Japanese Curry Fried Rice (カレーチャーハン)

Today I'm going to show you how to make an easy, aromatic, Japanese-style curry fried rice. So stick around. Welcome back to No Recipes. I'm Mark Matsumoto and I'm here to show you how to elevate your everyday meals. So smack that subscribe button and ring that bell so you don't miss out. Yakimeshi, or chahan, is Japanese-style fried rice. It's a quick, easy meal that you can throw together from leftovers. And my mom would often add a big spoonful of curry powder to amp up the flavor a bit. Paired with some sweet caramelized onions and some leftover rice, and you end up with this unbelievably fragrant meal that smells like a big bubbling pot of Japanese curry. Let's start with a look at our ingredients. I've got 400 grams of stale cooked white rice, 150 grams of ground beef, 50 grams mild green peppers, 100 grams of onion, 2 tablespoons of chuno sauce, 1 tablespoon of Japanese curry powder, and a half teaspoon of salt. The first thing I'm going to do is crumble up the rice so there are no clumps. This is why it's important to use stale rice, because fresh rice is going to stick together no matter how hard you try to break it up. When you're done, you should be able to sprinkle individual grains of rice like this. Now let's mince up the onions. I start by cutting slits on either side of the onion, and then I cut vertical slits almost to the bottom of the onion. Now I can rotate it 90 degrees and mince it up. You want to try and get these as small as possible so they caramelize quickly and blend in with the rice. The remaining bit I just flip down and slice, and then turn the strips and mince it up too. For the peppers, I'm going to start by trimming off both ends. Then I'm going to cut out the seeds and membranes. Next, I'm going to slice each sheet of pepper into strips. I'm using a variety of pepper called Pimon in Japan, but other mild peppers like Anaheim or Poblano will work. If you want a lot of heat, you could use a spicy chili as well. Now I'm going to turn these strips 90 degrees and dice them up into little squares. Okay, the prep's done, so let's get over to the stove and start cooking. I'm going to turn the stove on to high heat and add two tablespoons of vegetable oil to our pan. Then I'm going to add the onions and saute them until they're nice and brown. This is going to take about four to five minutes, so be patient. Caramelized onion is one of the key flavors in Japanese curry, so you don't want to cut corners here. Just don't overdo it at this stage, or they're going to end up burnt by the time the rice is done. Okay, these are looking just about right, so I'm going to go ahead and add the ground beef and use a spatula to break up the chunks into small crumbles. When the beef is cooked, add the rice and stir fry everything together until the rice is evenly coated with oil. Now we're going to sprinkle the curry powder evenly over the rice. If you dump it all in one spot, it's going to clump up. Next, I'm going to add the salt and the green peppers, and we're going to continue stir frying the rice until it's uniform in color and heated through. I'm using a combination of stirring and tossing to ensure I get the rice on the bottom up to the top, but if you're not confident in your tossing skills, just use two spatulas to toss the rice like you'd toss a salad. To finish this off, I'm going to drizzle on the tuna sauce and toss everything together. If you can't find tuna sauce where you live, tonkatsu sauce or okonomiyaki sauce will work, or you can just use a 50-50 mixture of ketchup and Worcestershire sauce. At this point, I want to get a little browning on my fried rice, so I'm going to stop stirring it for a bit and let the bottom brown. Then I'm going to toss it a few times to get the brown parts to come to the top. This is looking perfect and I can't express how good it smells, so I'm going to go ahead and pack it into a bowl so we can serve it up. Now I'm going to unmold this by covering the bowl with a plate and inverting it. Perfect, isn't it? Let's garnish that with a few sprigs of cilantro, and our Japanese curry fried rice is done! A bowl of hearty curry rice is one of my favorite comfort foods, but this easy fried rice recreates the flavors without all of the effort. I kept things simple today, but if you want to make this even more like a pot of Japanese curry, you can saute some diced carrots and potatoes at the beginning with the onions. If you're into making bento, this fried rice makes for an easy one-pan entree that you can pack with some fruits and veggies to make a colorful balanced lunch on the go. I used ground meat today, but this works great with leftover cuts of meat, seafood, or even mushrooms, so I hope you give it a try. If you enjoyed this video, you know what to do. Give us a big thumbs up and share it with your friends that could use a new fried rice recipe. I want to thank all of my patrons for helping to fund this video. You know who you are, and I'm thankful for each and every one of you. If you're learning something new from my recipes, I hope you'll consider clicking the link up here to join the No Recipes crew and help support our future videos. Well, the smell of that curry and fried onions is making my stomach growl, so I'll catch you in the next one.