This Garlic Rice Recipe Is Ridiculously Good!

I love garlic and this garlic rice recipe absolutely delivers. Big garlic flavor, crispy garlic on top, and a few simple techniques that take this humble side dish from good to great. For the full ingredient list, check the description box below, but enough talking, let's get cooking. The beauty of this recipe is how simple it is. I really want to emphasize that the best rice to start off with is going to be cold leftover rice. So if you really wanted to make this recipe best, just make rice the day before, eat it, but just make a whole lot of extra rice and then take the extra rice and then use that to make the garlic rice. We're also just going to use a couple of scallions, both the greens and the whites. And usually for this one, I like to use an entire head of garlic, usually has enough cloves that it's going to really pack a really awesome garlic punch. So let's set our rice aside and prep our garlic and scallions. So for the scallions, we'll cut off the ratty ends. I like to do that individually because I don't want to cut off anything that I don't have to cut off. The ends get a little beat up. And now from here, I'm going to push down the greens and I'm going to cut diagonally. We're going to use the greens to garnish. So we want them to be nice and fine. Once I've cut my greens, I can set those aside and now we're going to cut down the white parts of the scallions and those are going to end up being cooked inside the rice. I'm making sure I'm using the whole thing all the way down to the end and we just throw out those little root tips. Now for the garlic, we're going to peel all the garlic. There's a couple of ways that you can do this all at once. You can do it by hand. That's probably going to be the slowest. There's a few kitchen tricks that we can do. The first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to take off the outer skin of the garlic. So now I'm going to take a jar and I'm going to break off the individual garlic cloves and throw them inside the jar. I've showed this with a bowl before, but I wanted to show the jar one just in case you didn't want to take out the two bowls. This also works. I'm just going to shake the jar really vigorously. And as I'm doing that, banging the garlic cloves around and loosening up the paper on top of them. So now if we dump those out, you can see how easy the garlic peels now comes right off. Some of them, it's even shaken right off. You don't even have to peel it. Look at that. Just right off. Remember, God wanted us to eat garlic. It wouldn't make it this easy to peel if this wasn't intended to be eaten. And I could have done all that work by hand, but it was way quicker to do that. So how many cloves of garlic did we end up with? We got three, six, nine, we got 11. So we're going to take three of the bigger ones and we're going to set those aside and the rest we're going to finely slice. Again, we can do that work by hand, but nothing makes slicing easier than our mandolin. Just always make sure that you're using a cut glove so you don't end up in the emergency room. But we're going to use this mandolin and we're going to use a couple of slices just to see how thick we're going to get it. I think we can get it a little thinner than that. So we're going for, I don't know, that's probably about a 16th of an inch thick. To get this done with a knife, it's kind of easy, but it's harder to be really accurate. We want everything to cook at the same time. So we'll take our mandolin and slice down these garlic cloves. The garlic cloves we're going to use to make garlic chips with. The rest of the garlic that we set aside, we're going to use in the rice and we're going to cook it with the rice. And if I get any of these tips that I think I can get a couple more slices out of, I will take my knife and I'll very carefully cut off another slice or two away from this root end. I want to be very careful not to cut my hand. We are a minimal waste kitchen here. So our rice is ready, our scallions are sliced, our garlic is sliced and the rest of the garlic we set aside, we don't even have to do anything with it because we're going to shred it right into the pan. So let's head over to the stove and start cooking this garlic rice. So we're going to get this pan hot over a medium low heat. I don't want to burn the garlic and I'm choosing a nice pan. This is my carbon steel pan. It's kind of like in this wok style, it's got this rounded side. A wok would work really well here because we are making a version of fried rice because I want it to have a bottom that we can cook the garlic, but I also want nice high sides that can hold the rice. We don't have to wait for the pan to heat up, but I'm going to add a couple of tablespoons of oil and we're going to add our garlic in. I want to add the garlic when it's cold because I don't want the garlic to burn. I'm going to move the garlic around the pan so it sits nice and flat inside the oil. And now as the pan heats up, the garlic is going to start to fry. So a lot of times when you add the garlic to a hot pan, the pan's already too hot and then the garlic has a tendency to burn. Here, we want the garlic to cook, we want it to fry, we want it to release some of those natural sugars in there, but garlic can go from raw to burnt really fast. So we're being extra careful here by starting it in the cold pan. Once the oil is bubbling a little bit and the garlic is starting to fry, stay close because this is not going to take really long and what we're looking for is for this garlic to get just a little bit brown, but without burning. And while this is happening, all this oil inside the pan is infusing with garlic flavor. This is one of the techniques that is going to make this garlic rice really awesome where it's not just garlic and rice, but it's rice infused with garlic flavor. And it'll happen slowly, but the garlic will start taking on little bits of color. First the small ones, then the big ones, and I'll try to, at this point, start to mix it around so it browns a little bit more evenly. One thing you can also do too, if you feel like it's not cooking evenly, is you can tilt your pan so that all the oil pulls up on one side and now the garlic is deep frying a little bit more than it is shallow frying. And one of the benefits of deep frying is the evenness of the cooking. So you can just take your pan and just hang it out here and just toss everything around and just watch it brown. Once the garlic has taken on this nice brown color, I'm going to use the slotted spoon and remove the garlic and add it to a bowl with a little paper towel to catch the oil. But I'm going to make sure that I drip out any of the oil because we really want the oil inside the pan. That's going to be our garlic flavored cooking oil. So now to the garlic infused oil, we're going to add in our scallion whites, and then we're going to take those extra garlic cloves and we're going to shred in the garlic. The scallions are going to cook down really quick, so you might want to move quick shredding in this garlic. If you feel like you can't do it fast, you might want to pre-shred the garlic and then just dump it in after. But I'm trying to make this as simple as possible, and this is a little bit more simple. So now we're going to cook still over like a medium low heat, the garlic and the scallions. This is not going to take very long at all. At this point, we're going to season with a little salt. And one thing I also like to do too is I'll put just a little salt on the garlic chips. I'm going to just give those just a little toss. And so once the garlic becomes fragrant, which is only going to take maybe less than a minute, 30 seconds, especially when we shred it this fine, you can smell as the garlic goes from raw to cooked. So now we're going to take our cold day old rice and start adding it into the pan. And so now I'm just going to break up the clumps and I'm going to also work the garlic and the scallions into the rice. If you let the garlic and the scallions sit at the bottom of the pan, they're going to end up burning before the rice is cooked. So I'm just breaking up all the clumps of the cold rice while mixing in the garlic and the scallions and the garlic infused oil. I'm going to cook this for just a couple of minutes, maybe like three to five minutes until we just get the tiniest little color on the rice. And after we add the rice, we're also going to add just a touch more salt and season along the way, not dump all the salt in at once. You can see how separate the grains of rice are. That's one of the benefits of starting with the cold day old rice. If you do this with fresh rice, the rice has a tendency to like break up and mush more than it does to cook and separate. After the rice is cooked for that couple of minutes, we're going to add a little bit of butter and we're going to mix in the butter until it's nice and melted and the rice is well coated with the butter. I'm going to let that cook for just a minute after we added that butter and it's melted and nice and mixed. And lastly, we're just going to take the tiniest splash of rice vinegar and add it to the cooked rice. We want the rice vinegar to add an acid pop, which is going to help amplify the flavors, but we don't want it to overpower it. So I'm really going to make sure that I don't add a lot and I just add just a couple of drops and I'm going to do that all the way at the end. So we don't sog up the rice, but we get tons of flavor enhancement. Remember, salt and acid is what makes flavors pop inside food. So this rice is done. Let's take it off the heat. So now that our rice is done cooking, we just need to garnish it. So we're going to take some of those scallion greens and sprinkle those on top. And now to let everybody know that this is garlic fried rice or just garlic rice, I'm going to sprinkle on these delicious garlic chips. Now how amazing does this garlic rice look? It took like five minutes. This looks so delicious. I can't wait to try this. So let's take a big scoop of this garlic rice. I want to make sure I get plenty of those garlic chips. This smells absolutely fantastic. So let's get a little bit of everything on one bite. The rice, the garlic chips, an absolute must. This is going to be an epic bite. Rice is good. This is fantastic. And if you love garlic as much as I do, you are absolutely going to love this because this is so flavorful and so delicious and so easy. Oh my God. The garlic flavor just goes on and on and on. Your breath is going to be terrible for days after this and you're not going to care because this is so good. The crispy garlic chips, the soft buttery rice, the deep, deep garlic flavor that we're getting is amazing. You know, one of the things that's great about rice is that it goes with everything. If rice goes with everything, this goes with everything super big time because garlic is unbelievable. Rice is great. When they're eaten together, they are a wonderful, wonderful partnership. This is supposed to be a side dish, but if you just gave this to someone and you said we're just eating garlic rice for dinner, I don't think they're going to get upset because this is so good. The beauty of this recipe is how simple it is, how few ingredients there are. Now this is delicious home cooking and this is inspired by the Filipino dish, garlic rice. I don't know who's watching that's Filipino, but if you know some different tricks and stuff that you do or your grandma or your mom does, please let me know because I absolutely love garlic rice and I would love to know, could this be any better? This is your first time here and you like this video, like this video. Let me know what you thought about it in the comment section. If you make the recipe and you like it, let me know. And if you don't like it, you can let me know too. Get the notification bell on and subscribe so you can find out when I drop new recipe videos. And if you're into elevated rice dishes, check out my Jamaican rice and peas. That is a really nice elevated rice dish just like this one. It takes rice and it makes it even better. And I will see you there. Thank you.