Yangzhou Fried Rice | The Original Fried Rice | 扬州炒饭 | Easy Asian Recipe

So I had this idea right to do a fried rice recipe every Friday in February. It's going to be fried rice Fridays in February. As you can tell I've already missed one Friday. I kind of got the dates wrong. So this is better late than never but we're still going to try and do it. It's not going to be every Friday in February but for the next four weeks we'll be doing fried rice Friday. We're going to start with where it all began. The most famous fried rice in China. This is Yangzhou fried rice. So you're probably wondering why you've never heard of Yangzhou fried rice. Yangzhou fried rice is the most famous fried rice in all of China. Well if you're Chinese you probably have but if not it's probably just called fried rice in your local restaurant. In Australia it's mainly called special fried rice but all of that kind of bunch of different ingredients cut up small and tossed together in with rice is all a kind of a permutation of Yangzhou fried rice and the reason why it is is because Yangzhou is a city that's known for these things. Chinese cleavers obviously and the reason Yangzhou became so famous for its fried rice is because of the knife work involved. So all of those little cubes of vegetables and meat that you see in your fried rice is all kind of an interpretation of the classic Yangzhou fried rice and now that we know the history of Yangzhou fried rice it gives you an idea of how to make a good one. The important thing to know when you're making a good Yangzhou style fried rice is that all the ingredients have to be cut really really well. It's kind of a way for the cook to show off their knife work. In fact the ingredients that you choose aren't all that important. They are slightly important so I'll take you through what they are but you can use any different types of ingredients that you might like. I've got here some carrot, some spring onion, some garlic, this is bamboo shoot, peas. Now this is Chinese cured ham. China is very very big on cured hams. It's a little bit like pancetta or prosciutto and you could use those in substitution. You know your ordinary Chinese restaurant probably just uses regular leg ham or even Cantonese roast pork or even Chinese sausage something like that which is easier to get but if you can get your hands on Chinese cured ham like this one it's a very very flavourful ingredient. Now I've got some cooked chicken thigh and also some cooked chicken giblets. Giblets are the part of the chicken that helps grind down seeds and things so it's a very very firm muscle. I've chosen these because they add different textures to the rice. All of these ingredients as you cut them up and you bite them in the rice it's about creating texture within the fried rice. Some prawns, some shiitake mushrooms that have been steeped and some eggs as well and then of course you have this. This is the most important part of all. Already cooked cold overnight in the fridge so it's got a chance to dry out and I'll explain why a little bit later but this rice has actually been cooked in chicken stock. It's not just cooked in water. Of course you can just use rice cooked in water. You might have to add a little extra flavour after that so if you go to your regular Chinese restaurant and they haven't cooked their rice in chicken stock which most people haven't, they might add some chicken powder in when they're frying the rice which is very very common in Chinese restaurants even in Chinese home cooking. Maybe a pinch of MSG or something like that but if you can, the traditional way of making that Yangzhou-style fried rice is to cook the rice in chicken stock first. Now's the the labour-intensive part. I've got to chop up all these ingredients into about half centimetre dice. In French cooking you'd call that a masse d'oime. So about half a centimetre for all these ingredients. The prawns I can probably leave a little bit bigger but uniform cubes is very important. So the reason the and chicken are already cooked is because they do change shape after you cook them and the important part of the dish obviously is for everything to be cut to the same size. You just need to boil these a little bit before you cut them. You could just cook them raw, it just means that the the final result will be slightly different sizes, different shapes. So the cooking process is really just to preserve the shape of the ingredient. The prawns I can afford to leave a little bit bigger. Now you really do get a lot of flavour from this cured ham. Char siu, you know the Cantonese roast pork or even the lap cheong, the Cantonese style sausages will give you a lot of flavour as well but it's important to have some kind of ingredient that's going to provide a lot of depth and umami to the dish because the seasoning that goes into a fried rice is actually not very much at all. There's no heavy sauce, there's no no even soy sauce. I'm just going to season this just with salt. So the flavour of the ingredients is what gives the dish its flavour. All of these things combined together are going to give us a nice kind of base. The rice is going to go in with some of the egg and then the salt that seasons it gives you the taste of the dish. So a good cured meat is I think quite important. Pancetta, maybe prosciutto if you wanted or even just some ham or that nice Chinese sausage. Eggs next. I just need to mix those up a little bit. Now I'll pick all this stuff up, head over to the wok and finish it off. So when it comes to cooking process, it's actually kind of a three-stage process. Firstly we cook the ingredients, we kind of get that out of the way first and then the eggs and the rice form the base of the dish. Now there's actually two different traditional methods of making Yangzhou fried rice and one's much easier than the other one. They're either called silver over gold or gold over silver. Now the silver's the rice and the gold are the eggs and the name of the method refers to which one you add into the wok first. In the silver over gold method you fry the eggs first and then put the rice on top of the eggs. On the gold over the silver you fry the rice and pour the eggs on top of the rice. The silver over gold method is much much much easier for home cooking because for gold over silver when you're mixing raw eggs into rice you really have to be tossing that over very high heat otherwise you're just going to end up with an omelette. For the other one, for the silver over gold, you fry the eggs first until the eggs break down then the rice goes over the top. So let's get started. So as with all wok cooking, starts with a hot wok and then a reasonable amount of oil in there. I'm going to add more oil when I fry the rice and eggs but for now we just want a bit of oil to hold all of these other ingredients together. Aromatics first, so the garlic and then the onion. The next thing I want to add in is the cured pork because the fat will render into that oil and give us a lot of flavour that's going to carry around the rest of the dish. Then my vegetables and the prawns and chicken. Peas at the end and I'm just going to season that with a bit of salt. That looks pretty good so I'll take that out and set that to one side. Now if your wok's looking a bit dirty at this point you can brush it out under the sink but actually mine's looking all right so more oil going in then in with the eggs. Just want to whip those around until they start to break up and as soon as they sort of get a little bit dry that's when we can put our rice in. Now the rice is going to start to absorb the oil there so that's why you need quite a lot of oil in to stop it from sticking to the bottom of the wok. A bit of sticking is fine but the more oil you add the easier this dish will be. Now this is why you want day old rice. The technique is really to use the back of your wok tool to push the rice against the wok, breaking it up as it gets coated in the oil and that's going to give us nice separate grains rather than a gluggy fried rice. Plenty of salt in because that's pretty much our only seasoning here and then the rest of our ingredients back in to toss it all together. And that is the technique and the origin of pretty much every fried rice you've ever eaten. This is Yangzhou fried rice.