Yangzhou Fried Rice (扬州炒饭)

• porzioni: 2
• tempo totale: 3 hours, 30 minutes

Ingredienti

-450g Day-Old Jasmine Rice

-2 Eggs

-4 Dried Shittake Mushrooms, soaked in hot water for at least two hours before using

-6 Dried Scallops, soaked in hot water with mushrooms

-3 Tbsp. Soaking Liquid, reserved

-30g Jinhua or Parma Ham

-50g Pork Loin, diced

-50g Chicken Breast or Thigh, diced

-70g Shrimp, deshelled

-30g Peas

-40g Bamboo Shoots

-4 Green Onions, sliced, greens only

-1 tsp Cornstarch, divided - half for shrimp, half for meat

-1 tsp Salt, divided - 1/4 for shrimp, 1/4 for meat, 1/2 for sauce

-1 1/2 tsp Sugar, divided - 1/2tsp for meat, 1 tsp for sauce

-1 tsp Bouillon

-1 tsp Liaojiu or other Shaoxing or Chinese Rice Cooking Wine

-1/8 tsp MSG

-Lard, for frying

Istruzioni

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.