white fried rice

i love you, white rice: pt. 2

white fried rice

as you may know froman earlier post, i am fond of brown rice. and i will argue with you that it’s just as good as white rice in most ways and for most uses. but there are a few occasions where i think white rice, and in particular jasmine rice, is superior. one of those occasions is a pretty trashy one. years ago after leaving a club, on our way home, friends and i stopped into a perfect little chinese restaurant in the early morning hours as was our (and many others’) custom. the place was full of scarborough teens, twenty-somethings and the odd table of chinese adults eating plates of hot,tasty and sometimes unauthentic chinese food. we’d order black bean short ribs and chinese broccoli, but one friend would also always order sweet and sour pork and have a bowl of that and plain white rice to start. i would never have bothered to order that from a place that served such delicious “real” chinese food, but i followed her lead and have loved that combo ever since. jasmine rice, sweet and sour pork (mock pork these days) and sriracha sauce is still something i have appreciated ever since. but only with white rice. the flavour and dense texture of properly cooked fresh jasmine rice and the sweet, crispy and chewy red pork are a great match. as with the seaweed + rice combo, perhaps because there are only two star players, white jasmine’s texture and taste stand out as superior to brown.

and when life gives you stale rice, you make fried rice. my mother doesn’t see the point in making fried rice with brown rice but i sometimes make brown fried rice and it’s good. (she will make fried rice with par-boiled rice. gross! not enough starch to make the flavours stick, in my opinion, but she doesn’t seem to notice.) but yet another friend turned me on to this simple breakfast of garlic fried rice and egg, and here again, white rice is an important factor. it couldn’t be easier to make. finely chop up 2-3 gloves of garlic, add to hot oil in a hot wok and stir-fry for 20 seconds. add 2 cups of day-old white rice and a sprinkle of salt and pepper. add (or don’t add, both ways are tasty) a tablespoon of tamari or good soy sauce, fry until all of the rice is broken up, coated and hot. i like to have a couple of tiny clumps of rice in my fried rice so i’m not obsessive about breaking up every mound. serve into bowls with a fried egg on top, yolk down so that when it breaks it flows right onto the rice, with a little sriracha sauce. spicy, salty, very garlicy, umami goodness on a cold saturday morning.
garlic fried rice & fried egg