Recipe: How to Make Yangzhou Fried Rice (扬州炒饭)
So we wanted to teach you how to make a fried rice, and figured there’s no better place to start than the classic Yangzhou fried rice.
Now, it should be said upfront that proper Yangzhou fried rice is sort of a deluxe fried rice… it’s fried with lard and uses a bunch of dried umami-rich ingredients (the traditional recipe even calls for sea cucumber). We’re following a super old-school cookbook for this, but rarely will restaurants go this far – so feel free to play around with the recipe and make it your own.
[Video is here if you’d like a visual to follow along](https://youtu.be/QsHLgZhkKyc).
**Ingredients:**
1. *Jasmine Rice (丝苗米/泰国香米), 450g*. Ok, let’s talk rice prep. Fried rice is like allergic to wet, sticky rice. For fried rice, you either wanna use day old rice *or* rice cooked at a dry ratio. Leaving the rice out overnight isn’t a must – after thoroughly rinsing the rice until the water ran clear, we drained it (draining in a strainer’s an important step!) and cooked our Jasmine Rice at a ratio of 1.2 parts rice to one part water (that’s not a typo, 375g of water) and spread it out over a plate until the rice cooked and the steam dissipated. Of course, what’s often easier is just using leftover white rice: if going that route, spread the rice over a plate and have it dry out overnight in the fridge.
2. *Eggs, 2.* We’re just using two eggs here, but I’ve seen some recipes call for more.
3. *Dried Shittake Mushrooms (冬菇), 3-4*. Like always, leave this to soak in hot, boiled water for at least two hours. You could also just start soaking these in room temperature water in the morning, and they’ll be done by the time you get home for dinner.
4. *Dried Scallops (干瑶柱/干贝),5-6* Soak these together with the dried mushrooms. As always, don’t toss the soaking liquid, because…
5. *Reserved Mushroom/Scallop soaking liquid, 3 tbsp.* If you’ve read any of these before, you’ve probably heard me wax poetic about this stuff. The soaking liquid from dried mushrooms and shellfish is just as good if not *better* than stock, and obviously vastly easier to make. This is gunna form the basis of the sauce/seasoning liquid.
6. *Jinhua Ham (金华火腿), 30g.* Jinhua Ham is a dried cured Chinese ham that’s made by more or less the process as Spanish Jamón ibérico. If you’re outside China and can’t find this, that Iberian Ham’s an obvious sub… or you could sub in Lap Cheong, a country ham or a Parma ham, or do what many restaurants outside China do and just use some Char Siu or wet-cured ham.
7. *Pork Loin (瘦肉), 50g*. We’re just gunna be dicing this up.
8. *Chicken Breast or Thigh (鸡胸肉), 50g*. Same sort of deal – we’re just dicing this up, anything boneless or skinless’ll do the trick.
9. *Shrimp (虾仁), 70g.* Deshell these guys. Devein them, don’t devein them… up to you. We don’t devein them because we feel deveining shrimp is a completely unnecessary pain (unless it’s some sort of jumbo prawn).
10. *Peas (豌豆), 30g.*Always a consistent component of Yangzhou fried rice, gives some color and texture.
11. *Bamboo shoots (竹笋), 40g*. Bamboo shoots are another awesome, umami-rich ingredient and’ll also give this dish some crunch. Canned bamboo shoots are totally fine.
12. *Green onions (葱), ~4 sprigs*. Green part only, cut into slices.
13. *Cornstarch (生粉).* ½ tsp to marinate the shrimp, ½ tsp to marinate the meat (the pork and chicken cubes are marinated together).
14. *Salt*. ¼ tsp to marinate the shrimp, ¼ tsp to marinate the meat, ½ tsp for the sauce/seasoning liquid.
15. *Sugar*. ½ tsp to marinate the meat, 1 tsp for the sauce/seasoning liquid.
16. *Stock concentrate (鸡汁), 1 tsp.* For the sauce/seasoning liquid. Whenever you see these in one of our recipes, know that you can sub with bullion powder (half tsp powder for every one tsp concentrate). We usually opt for concentrate because there’s some producers here in China that make some *awesome* high quality stock concentrates – if you’re just using Knorr, there wouldn’t really be too much of a quality difference between powder and concentrate.
17. *Liaojiu (料酒), 1 tsp.* A.k.a. Shaoxing wine, Huangjiu, Chinese Rice Cooking Wine.
18. *MSG (味精), 1/8 tsp.* Just a sprinkle. This is optional I guess, but we’re sort of fully on the MSG train now. A little goes a long way, and you want it in the background playing off the other ingredients. If you’re outside China I believe ‘Accent’ is a brand of MSG that’s available at most supermarkets, or you could sub in some bullion powder which also usually contains MSG unless explicitly stated otherwise.
19. *Lard (猪油).* For frying. You could really fry with any sort of oil you want… but this was our first time frying rice with lard and it’s delicious. I know sometimes you can find lard at the supermarket, but it’s pretty easy to make… so check the note on ‘how to make lard’ in the notes below if you don’t already know how.
**Process:**
1. *Soak your dried ingredients.* As we mentioned above, if you’re on a standard sort of work schedule, setting them out in the morning in room temperature water might be a good idea to have them ready for dinnertime. Otherwise, set them in hot, boiled water for 2-3 hours.
2. *Make/prepare your rice.* If using leftover white rice, remember to spread it out on a plate and let it dry overnight. If you’re going all out and just making some rice specifically for this dish… cook it at a dry ratio of 1.2 parts Jasmine rice to 1 part water, then spread it out over a plate to help the steam dissipate. Once the rice is cool, it’s ready to cook.
3. *Dice the pork, the chicken, the ham, and the bamboo shoots. Get the reconstituted mushrooms into a small dice, cut each shrimp into three pieces, and cut the scallop into 4-5 small pieces.* Lots of dicing. When you’re working with the dried scallop, what you’re looking to do is make one cut against the grain of the scallop. This’ll make it easy for the scallop to sort of ‘crumble apart’ into a couple pieces when you press it.
4. *Marinate the shrimp, the chicken and pork, and prepare the sauce/seasoning liquid.* For our marinades we’re using some dry marinades – for fried rice, we *really* wanna control how much liquid’s going into the dish. The shrimp we’re marinating with ¼ tsp salt and a ½ tsp cornstarch, the chicken and pork is mixed together and marinated with ¼ tsp salt, ½ tsp cornstarch, and also a ½ tsp sugar. The sauce/seasoning liquid is a mix of three tbsp of that reserved soaking water, ½ tsp salt, 1 tsp sugar, and the stock concentrate, liaojiu, and MSG.
5. *Longyau, then fry the shrimp.* As always, first *longyau* – get that wok piping hot (hot enough where your hand would be noticeably uncomfortable holding it an inch or two above the bottom of the wok), shut off the heat, add in your oil (here we use lard as the cooking oil), and give it a thorough swirl to get a nice non-stick surface. The basic idea of the *longyau* is that heating it up will evaporate the moisture and humidity from the surface of the wok, allowing the oil to cling to the carbon steel and create a non-stick surface wherever it’s swirled to (disclaimer: not a chemist). Once you’re finished with that *longyau* process, you turn on your flame to the desired temperature and *immediately* add in the ingredient – here, for the shrimp we want medium-high. Stir fry for about a minute until the shrimp are done and have changed color, then take them out and set them aside.
6. *Fry the meats, the dried mushrooms and scallops, the ham, the peas and bamboo shoots, then cook it together with your sauce/seasoning liquid.* So these are going to be added in stages as they each have different cooking times. Sticking on medium-high, first toss in the chicken and pork (fry for roughly a minute), then add in the dried mushrooms and scallops (fry for roughly 30 seconds), then the ham (another 30 second fry), and finally the peas and bamboo shoots (fry for roughly one more minute). Then, up the heat to high and add in the sauce/seasoning liquid. Once that liquid comes up to a boil, shut off the heat and take everything all out, liquid included – note that the liquid’ll be, well, liquid-y… we’re not looking for thickening or anything.
7. *Longyau, then fry the egg.* That *longyau* process is gunna be especially important when frying rice, as rice sticking to the wok is like the worst nightmare of cooks everywhere. This time, after *longyau* put the flame to medium-low and toss in two thoroughly whisked eggs. Give em a scramble for about a minute or so… once some curds’ve started to form, you’re ready to add in the rice.
8. *Toss in the rice together with the egg, fry over high heat, then add back the rest of the ingredients.* Now up the heat to high and add in the rice. The technique for frying rice is to alternate between two motions: (1) pressing down on the rice with the spatula to break down the clumps and (2) scraping and pulling up from the bottom to prevent sticking. I know my words are sort of failing me here, so check out 5:12 [in the video](https://youtu.be/QsHLgZhkKyc?t=5m11s) for a visual. What we want is for the rice to dry out a bit and loosen up into clear, separate individual grains. The rice’ll be done once the grains of rice are loose enough to sort of ‘flow’ off your spatula, but the timing will depend on how dry your rice was initially (for the rice we used in the video that was about three minutes, but super-moist takeout rice might even need like double that). Then, add back the stir-fry we made in step #6. Fry them together for about a minute til there’s no liquid remaining, then add in the shrimp and the green onions. Give it a quick mix, then serve.
**A note on other Yangzhou Fried Rice Ingredients:**
We were following that old-school cookbook pretty closely here, so we feel compelled to tell you what else was on their full ingredient list.
First thing they were asking for that we didn’t use was dried and reconstituted sea cucumber. Sea cucumber’s nice but certainly ain’t cheap, and we didn’t really feel like dropping a few hundred CNY for testing out this recipe. Add it in if you like, they’ll impart a real nice texture if you’re into that sort of thing.
Second thing we didn’t use was chicken liver. Diced chicken liver’s pretty tasty in stir-fried rice, but we didn’t add them in… mostly due to laziness. Our local market has chicken liver, but you gotta get there real early (like before 7:30) else they sell out.
**A note on how to make lard:**
Now the way I make lard isn’t necessarily interesting, or have any special Chinese technique to it or anything. If you find me confusing, there’s also like a million tutorials good out there about how to make it.
Get some pork fat… cut any little scraps of meat you might see off it, and wash away any blood. Cut the fat into rough cubes, put em in a large pot, and pour some water in until it’s *just* covering the cubes. Put it on a high enough heat to get the water to a real hefty simmer. Once the water’s basically evaporated (after ~20 minutes), lower the heat to low to let the oil render out from the pork fat (should take 40-60 minutes). Stir periodically to make sure the fat’s not sticking to the bottom.
Once you get a solid chunk of oil and the fat’s shrunk significantly, strain the oil. Slightly cheaper for us than other sorts of non-blended oils, and a really tasty oil to fry with. Supposedly healthier than butter too (though I guess that’s not saying much).