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Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

> Fried rice is one of the hardest Chinese dishes to cook at home, especially if you don't have a high-temperature gas range and want to reduce the amount of oil in the recipe. Lots of scraping and hard pushing motions to break up the rice, not to mention the slicing/dicing required for prep.

I found this funny. That's a fair call on the slicing/dicing, except I'm pretty sure the traditional way to make fried rice is to throw in whatever leftovers you already have to hand.

So if you're already cooking other Chinese food, fried rice is just a mostly-free leftovers dish. It works as part of the entire Chinese-food cultural complex; it's harder to slot in to a schedule of foreign food, where every element of it has to be prepared specially.

(Of course it's popular in restaurants now, and they must make it in a consistent way. But you don't need to.)

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Doing a mushy, sad fried rice at home is easy. But I think op was referring to the difficult of making -good- fried rice.

It's not the ingredients or prep that is hard, it's that you need a carbon steel wok and enough BTUs to keep that wok around 500F even while dropping cold ingredients into it.

Without a carbon steel or cast iron pan and enough constant temp, you won't get the "wok hei" which really affects flavor and texture.

J Kenji Lopez has a great write up on the difficulties of good fried rice at home. https://www.seriouseats.com/2012/06/the-food-lab-for-the-bes...

Fried rice is usually made with rice leftovers which have somewhat dried out. It's a way to make those leftovers more palatable. If it's mushy it means that the rice was too moist.

It's simple to make with your standard (deep) frying pan, on your standard cooker.

>It's simple to make with your standard (deep) frying pan, on your standard cooker.

If you believe that, my friend, then you have not had really good fried rice. Give the article I posted a read of you want more info on why.

>was referring to the difficult of making -good- fried rice.

I don't really understand, just fry your ingredients at high heat and don't stop stirring. Make sure the pan is hot before you add oil, make sure the oil's hot before you add the ingredients. Start with the meat/protein, when that's browned, if you really want it all nice and cooked well, take the meat out and put it aside then do the onions, theb mushrooms, peppers, veggies etc. Garlic and ginger and stuff last, re-add the meat, add your cooked rice, maybe an egg at that point and keep stirring until it's nice and golden brown.

Did you read the parent article? There’s a distinct smoky, rich flavor and lack of mush that great fried rice has that only occurs under those conditions.

Sure, homemade fried rice can be good (with some more work than you said) but that’s not what the parent was saying.

Oil has a smoke point of about 200 C. The author wrote:

The trick is to ensure that the rice constantly leaves the wok, allowing it to cool a little, since the wok temperature can reach up to 1,200 degrees Celsius.

I am pretty sure that it’s a typo, it would basically melt your wok at that temperature. But also someone else here was speaking about constant temperatures of 500F that is still well over the oil smoke point. So I think that I’m missing something here.

> But also someone else here was speaking about constant temperatures of 500F that is still well over the oil smoke point.

Not “well over” for many refined oils (smoke points of 450°F+ are not uncommon for refined oils), and not even “over” for a few (e.g., avocado, safflower.)

Is it common to throw the egg in at the end? I was always taught to fry and scramble the egg in the oil first.

I live in Japan and have only ever seen people putting the egg first, then rice, then seasonings and toppings

I'm a fan of mixing a couple of egg yolks with the cold unfried rice at the beginning, gives you a texture and flavour that's very unique compared to normal fried rice.

There seem to be a few schools of thought - one is to mix some egg through the cold rice before frying, one is to add egg mixture near the end, one is to fry the egg and like an omelette and chop it up and add.

> one is to fry the egg like an omelette and chop it up and add

That's the one I would consider normal.

I like my eggs less well done. Eggs cook fast, especially on high heat.

Great write up from J Kenji Lopez! Thanks for sharing link.

The ingredients aren't the hard part - it's the technique and equipment involved. There's lot's of other "simple" dishes like this where it's all about technique and not just getting the right ingredients: french omelettes, bread, carbonara etc

Bread is definitely a part about getting good flour, you can get everything else right, but a poorly stored flour can make it end up bad.

Can’t speak for Chinese, but Thai fried rice is a very specific dish that doesn’t have much variation, other than the choice of protein source.

Chinese fried rice isn't like that at all.

I am Thai and pretty sure this is not true.

Yeah I varies quite a bit is texture and flavor between provinces too

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