Chicken Fried Rice, Restaurant Style at Home

Every time we ordered takeaway fried rice, I wondered why mine never tasted like that. Mine was soft and a bit sticky, theirs had that smoky, savoury flavour and every grain stood on its own. It took me embarrassingly long to work out the secret, and it was not a special sauce or a fancy pan. It was cold rice. Day-old rice, straight from the fridge, is the whole trick — and once I started cooking it that way, my fried rice finally tasted like the restaurant version.

This is now one of our most-cooked weeknight dinners, because it uses up whatever is in the fridge and it is on the table in about twenty minutes. The chicken stays juicy, the vegetables keep their crunch, and the eggs scramble right into the rice the way they should. My children call it ‘the good rice’, which is the highest praise a dinner gets in this house.

Watch: Chicken Fried Rice, Restaurant Style at Home

Prep time: 15 minutes | Cook time: 15 minutes | Servings: 4

Ingredients

• 400 g cooked long-grain rice, cold (ideally day-old)
• 2 chicken breasts, diced into small pieces
• 2 eggs, lightly beaten
• 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
• 1 onion, finely chopped
• 2 garlic cloves, minced
• 1 teaspoon fresh ginger, grated
• 1 carrot, diced small
• 100 g frozen peas
• 3 spring onions, sliced
• 3 tablespoons soy sauce
• 1 tablespoon oyster sauce (optional)
• 1 teaspoon sesame oil
• Salt and white pepper, to taste

Method

1. If your rice is freshly cooked, spread it on a tray to cool completely. If you can, use day-old rice straight from the fridge instead. Cold, dry rice fries beautifully; warm, damp rice just steams and clumps together, and no amount of stirring will save it.
2. Season the diced chicken with salt and pepper. Heat 1 tablespoon of the oil in a large wok or frying pan over a high heat and cook the chicken for 4 to 5 minutes, until it is golden at the edges and cooked right through. Lift it out onto a plate and set it aside.
3. Pour the beaten eggs into the same hot pan and scramble them quickly, about 30 seconds, breaking them into thin ribbons. Tip them out with the chicken.
4. Add the rest of the oil to the pan and fry the onion for 2 minutes, until it softens. Add the garlic and ginger and cook for 30 seconds more, until the kitchen smells wonderful — do not let the garlic brown or it turns bitter.
5. Add the carrot and peas and stir-fry for 2 minutes. The carrot should soften a little but still keep its bite; nobody likes a soggy pea.
6. Tip in the cold rice and break up any clumps with the back of a spoon. Press the rice into the pan and leave it alone for about 30 seconds between stirs, so the grains get a little golden and toasty at the edges. That toasting is where the flavour comes from.
7. Tip the chicken and eggs back into the pan. Pour the soy sauce and oyster sauce around the edge of the pan, not into the middle, so they sizzle before they hit the rice. Toss everything together for 2 minutes until it is all hot and evenly coloured.
8. Finish with the sesame oil and most of the spring onions. Taste it and add a little more soy sauce or salt if it needs it, then serve straight away, while it is still steaming.

Serving and Storage

Serve it straight from the wok in warm bowls, scattered with the remaining spring onions and, if you like, a little chilli sauce on the side. Leftover fried rice keeps in the fridge for 2 days and reheats well in a hot pan with a splash of water. Do not leave cooked rice sitting out at room temperature for long, and never reheat it more than once — that is one food safety rule worth taking seriously.

Tips

The biggest lesson I learned is that the pan must be very hot — that is what gives fried rice its smoky flavour, the thing the Chinese call ‘wok hei’. Cook in batches if your pan is small; crowding it makes everything steam instead of fry. Keep everything chopped and ready before you start, because once the pan is hot you will not have time to chop anything. And cold rice really is non-negotiable — if you only have fresh rice, spread it on a tray and put it in the fridge for an hour, or even the freezer for 20 minutes, to dry it out.

Next time you have leftover rice in the fridge, do not throw it away — make this. Twenty minutes later you will have a dinner that tastes like your favourite takeaway, made in your own kitchen, with whatever you had on hand. That is the kind of cooking I love most.