This recipe demonstrates the two principles to cooking so very well. Splitting up the oils and water ingredients, the timing of the ingredients and always keeping in mind that everything is a salad. Fried rice is exactly that a salad – a warm rice salad! Have a look and give it a try, you will be cooking awesome dishes that everyone will want to eat!
Recipe:
Ingredients:
- Oil
- Egg
- Onion
- Ham (or any other cooked meat)
- Shallots / Scallions
- Carrots
- Peas
- Prawns / Shrimp
- Rice
- Oyster Sauce
- Soy Sauce
Preparation:
- Cook rice as per direction in packet or have cooked rice prepared previously
- Julienne onion and carrots
- Cut ham or any other cured or cooked meat to desired size
- Chop shallots / scallions into small pieces
Method:
- Heat pan or wok over high heat
- Add oil
- Crack egg into bowl and beat egg well
- Fry egg until liquid becomes solid, remove egg
- Add more oil if needed
- Fry onion until starting to caramalise
- Fry ham or meat and start tossing ingredients
- Add shallots / scallions and fry for about half a minute
- Add carrots, mix and fry
- Add peas and fry and mix for a couple of minutes
- Put fried egg back into wok or pan and break up egg into smaller pieces
- Add cooked rice fry and mix
- Season with salt, pepper and soy sauce
- (optional: add a small amount of oyster sauce)
- Add prawns / shrimp, mix and fry until prawns become warm throughout
- Serve and garnish with fresh shallots / scallions
Additional Notes
- For Vegetarian option replace meat with a hard fried tofu, you can also leave out the egg and use a vegetarian oyster sauce
Video Transcript
Hello and welcome to good for you living, this is the first video in the cooking basics series where I’m going to show you a simple two step method that’s going to allow you to cook 80% of meals known to man. Ok maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration but you get the idea. Like most things to be successful you need good preparation and plenty of practice.
So what’s this two step method that I’m talking about. Ok first it’s about oil and water – you separate the ingredients that you are going to cook in oil and those that you are going to cook in water. And second everything is a salad so if you’ve ever made a salad before you’ll be able to make this dish without a problem. To illustrate this we are making fried rice.
Traditionally it’s a savoury dish with a hint of sweetness, it’s very versatile, inexpensive and very easy to make. So I hope this is going to be good for you and let’s start cooking.
Ok let’s fire up the wok over a high heat, we’ll get it nice and hot and I like using a wok because it’s like a large salad bowl. First principle is about oil and water and you can click on the link for more detailed explanation. Let’s start with heating up some oil. And our oil ingredients are eggs, onion, some ham, some shallots or scallions, our water ingredients are carrots, peas, prawns or shrimp, some rice and oyster sauce and soy sauce.
Ok beating up the egg really well folding in lots of air making it nice and fluffy, we have this on a high heat and we want to cook this really hot and fast. I’ve added a pinch of salt to the egg already just to bring out the sweetness of the yolk. And there are two reasons why we are cooking the egg first. One is that we don’t want the egg liquid to mix with the other ingredients and that’s coming along nicely and you don’t have to cook it all the way through. And the second we don’t want it to burn as we go along. So we are going to remove it back to it’s bowl.
Ok we throw in the onion first as this is going to take the longest to cook. If you need to add some extra oil then do so. Now you can see that the onion is thinly sliced for faster cooking. Ok that’s about one minute and the onion is starting to brown and the aroma is popping out, adding in the ham and we just let that fry. It’s already cooked so we only need to heat it up, but if you want it crunchy then cook it a bit longer.
In go the shallots or scallions, this is going to be quick and give them a bit of a mix, and we can start moving onto our water ingredients. First it’s going to be the carrots, and see it’s just a salad with warm ingredients so it’s just a matter of tossing and turning. next we are going to move on to the peas. Throw them, and have a look at the colour of this dish, it’s looking great.
So that’s been cooking for about two minutes now, we can reintroduce our egg back into the mix, and break it up a little bit, and that’s coming up really nice. Now for the rice, put that in, let’s get every last speck of rice in there. once we have this cooking the ingredients will become more fragile so we don’t want to over do it with the mixing, what we will do is pat the dish down to cover more surface area and let it cook. We are ready for the final stage in the salad and that is the dressing, which is water intensive. It’s just going to be a dash of salt, and we’ll throw in a bit of pepper and finally some soy sauce, and straight away you hear it sizzle as your sauce reduces and intensifies. And the colour is coming along quite well, so we’ll give this a nice mix through. Now I’m going to add some oyster sauce here, and traditionally you would not add any oyster sauce but it’s my cheat ingredient. If you are not getting the restaurant flavour or it’s a bit too bland, put a small amount of this oyster sauce in to give it a full flavour taste.
So finally the cooked prawns or shrimp, they only need to be heated gently as we don’t want to dry them out with over cooking. and we will just toss this around like a salad and let it get consistent heat through it.
We started with our oil ingredients, onion ,ham, shallots and eggs, then followed by our oil ingredients in order of how long they need to be cooked. So carrots, peas, rice, prawns, then the dressing for our salad, salt, pepper, soy sauce and my cheat ingredient oyster sauce. All up cooking time was under six minutes and it’s ready when you say so. If you want the rice a little bit crunchier just cook it for a little bit longer and it will dry out and wow that looks amazing, it’s so mouth watering. And just one final touch, I’m going to dress it up with some of the green scallions or shallots.
There you have it cooking explained with two easy principles. First it’s about oil and water and second everything is a salad. Keep those things in mind when you tackle future recipes. in future videos I will be putting this theory to the test where I make pastas, stir frys, currys and a whole lot more. I started off with fried rice because of it’s versatility and now you can try different spices, maybe chilli and garlic, you can try different meats, chicken, seafood, ground beef and try different combinations, go vegetarian try ham and pineapple, meat lovers, supreme. ok they sound a lot like pizza toppings and that’s because they are very interchangeable. Start experimenting and start creating your own signature dish. Visit good for you living dot com. Like my videos, leave a comment, send me a recipe challenge or just tell me how you’re doing. and above all, remember living it’s good for you.