First things first: without a restaurant-style gas burner and wok capable of handling the high heat of said burner, you simply aren’t going to infuse the wok hei necessary for that smoky caramelized aroma into your rice at home. But, this still leaves open the opportunity or a different flavor profiles that you cannot get in a restaurant, and isn’t that the entire point of home cooking?
Each component of good fried rice has its own required cooking characteristics, and so accomodating each one to bring out the best result needs to be done carefully!
As always in this style of cooking, start with the high-temperature components. At this point, the goal is to fry the hell out of anything that requires high heat before adding the bulk of food makes those temperatures infeasible to reach.
Preheat, preheat, preheat! Nothing should be added to the pan until it is hot, hot enough so that drips of water bead up and Leidenfrost their way across the pan’s surface. Only at that point, add your cooking oil and any aromatics that specifically dissolve only in oil, along with any bits of fatty meat you wish to include:
Move on when the ingredients are charred and browned to taste.
At this point, add in the rice - the day-old refridgerated stuff is best, and try to have it as hard as is still palatable, otherwise the intense cooking will too easily break it down. As cold rice likes to form a solid block, chop it up with the wooden spatula and smooth it out somewhat, but most of this can only really be done when the watery ingredients are added to break up the rice.
The goal now is to fry the rice in the oil, developing a thin crispy husk on as many grains as is possible to give the final dish some “bite”. Constant stir-frying is best here to keep cycling out the oil coating the rice so it can keep heating it up.
Move on when the rice starts to develop the slightest golden coloration, or depending on how tough you like your rice.
While the high-temperature components are now mostly done, there are still other ingredients which cannot tolerate frying, and those still need to be added. At this point, the main goal is to cool down the pan - turn the heat down to low-medium, and start
Move on when the pan is cooled to around 120C, or when water dripped in the pan does not almost immediately boil away.
Here is the secret to good combination cooking: Sauces not only add rich flavor to a dish, they also add essential water, which at this point will help to steam the rest of the ingredients, including the rice. Common choices are:
While this steam will undo some of the crispness of the rice, it will still retain enough of its structure, and furthermore it is essential to the final texture that starches in the rice are allowed to dissolve into a sticky network.
Additionally, the gentle steaming process is ideal for ingredients such as leafy vegetables, which are in turn ideal for your health, so eat your damn vegetables!
In case the total water content added here is not quite enough, simply put the lid on the pan to recycle the escaping steam.
Move on when anything added here is done to your liking, or when the rice becomes sticky enough to spread around the pan almost like dough.
At this point, the fried rice is done by most traditional standards. However, I always add one more step to really elevate the dish. Spread the rice out into a thin flat layer covering the entire pan’s surface, and then turn the heat on to the maximum. This will develop a scorched layer of crunch in the rice that adds a wonderfully complex texture at the same time as imparting a pale shadow of wok hei into the flavor, which really is the best you can hope for at home.
The scorched layer is done when scraping the bottom with the wooden spatula encounters resistance that needs to be pushed through - you can repeat this process as many times as you like to continue scorching more and more rice.
The eyes eat first, and so this is your last opportunity to dress the dish up, to express your creativity. Some recommendations are:
but really, your imagination is your limit.