1 208 208 208c52 0 99. Fried rice recipe post may contain affiliate links. The BEST homemade fried rice recipe! Way better than any Chinese takeout I’ve ever tried.
This Chinese-inspired fried rice recipe is my absolute fave. Gimme Some Oven: This easy fried rice recipe only takes 15 minutes to make, it’s easy to customize with your favorite add-ins, and it’s SO delicious! I’m digging back into the blog archives today to share one of my all-time favorite recipes. Growing up, our family had a tradition of eating lunch every Saturday at our neighborhood’s favorite local Chinese restaurant. And every single Saturday for lunch, I ordered the same thing — egg drop soup and fried rice, my absolute favorites. This restaurant set the bar high for me early when it comes to how amazing fried rice could be. After our favorite restaurant sadly closed over a decade ago, I spent years tinkering around with dozens and dozens of batches of fried rice, attempting to recreate a fried recipe that tasted as good as theirs.
And while nothing will ever match the original in my book, this fried rice recipe that I’ve landed on is as close as I’ve come and has been my favorite go-to ever since. Let’s make some homemade fried rice! Tips For Making The Best Fried Rice: Ok, let’s get right to it. Use cold rice: You’ve gotta plan ahead and use thoroughly-chilled cooked rice. So leftover refrigerated rice is ideal! I have made many a batch of fried rice using various oils, and I’m now convinced there’s a reason why Japanese steak houses use that big slab of butter when they’re making fried rice.
It just tastes so much better, and also makes everything brown up perfectly. Although by contrast to Japanese steak houses, we only use 3 tablespoons for a large batch of rice in this recipe. Use veggies: This is one of my big pet peeves with lame take-out fried rice — not enough veggies! In addition to adding some nice spots of color, veggies go a long way in adding some flavor and freshness to fried rice. Our local Chinese restaurant always added both white and green onions, too, which I included in this recipe. But feel free to modernize this recipe with some other delicious stir-fried veggies as well! Use toasted sesame oil and oyster sauce: If you do not eat seafood, you can leave out the oyster sauce and your fried rice will still be great.
But this ingredient makes such a difference in good fried rice, and a little goes a long way. So even if you’re not into oysters, don’t be scared of oyster sauce! Use high heat: This will help fry and brown the rice and veggies well, and will also help prevent the rice from steaming in the pan instead of frying. Let the rice brown a bit on the bottom: If you’re like me and love your rice to be a bit crispy, let it rest for a bit in between stirs so that it can brown a bit on the bottom. It also helps greatly to use a non-stick skillet so that the rice doesn’t stick to the bottom of the pan. Don’t be afraid to add in some extra soy sauce at the end: I know that everyone has different sensitivities to salt, and different brands of soy sauce also contain pretty dramatically different levels of sodium. So I went a little light on soy sauce in the recipe below.