This piece was originally published on my Medium.
(image via https://healthynibblesandbits.com)
Ah yes, fried rice: a hearty dish that harmonizes all sorts of delectable morsels in a delightful bed of pillowy starch, colored with vibrant sauces and topped with playful garnishes.
It’s my favorite food.
My mom used to say that “Koreans and fried rice are like white folks and casserole”. I grew up eating a lot of this stuff. My mom makes it for breakfast sometimes with plentiful bits of scrambled egg and generous drizzlings of sesame oil. It’s like a warm, savory blanket for the belly, always the first thing I ask her to make when I visit.
Once I left the nest and started cooking for myself, daily helpings of fried rice were slowly replaced by an assorted stream of recipes from random YouTube chefs. It’s strange, when you grow up with one culture in the home and then leave it for another one in the world, it takes a while to realize you’ve got to actively bring that stuff from home with you to keep it alive. So now I make fried rice at school. It’s worse than my mom’s, but still pretty good.
A good fried rice should make you feel happy. The key is not to think about it too hard:
- The rice? Use whatever you’ve got — the leftover cold rice from Chinese take-out is the best.
- Add something rich and savory as your base — bacon, tofu, eggs, veggies — and cook it down to a crisp, so you get those dangerously delightful burned bits that pop like little umami crystals in your mouth.
- Add some sauces; I use soy sauce and sesame oil, mostly. You want a good consistency — each rice grain, meat morsel, and diced veggie should hug the other in a tight, saucy embrace.
- Top it off with an egg over easy, and you have got yourself a little bowl of love.
I love to show my non-Korean friends how to make fried rice. They’re always amazed at its simplicity. The nonchalantness of my tossing and drizzling conveys the illusion of mastery, and they gasp in hushed wonder as I sprinkle toasted sesame seeds like pan-Asian pixie dust.
Once they get the hang of it, they giggle with self-satisfaction, beaming with the knowledge that they are now privy to one of the deepest secrets of the Asian kitchen. I like to think of fried rice as the most cosmopolitan of the Asian dishes, both within Asia and beyond. It brings different ingredients together; it brings different people together.
Every time I look at a bowl of fried rice I’ve made, it’s like I’m looking at myself at that point in time. Every bowl is different, never quite true to tradition (whatever that means).
Today, it’s an awkwardly delicious blend of taco-seasoned ground beef, carrots, and brown rice, because I didn’t feel like eating my meal-prep meal right out of the microwave. Last week, it was a mix of leftover takeout rice, poorly chopped vegetables, and canned tuna, half-cooked because my friend and I forgot to pack a second propane tank for our camping trip. Tomorrow morning, I’ll add bacon, but shoulder bacon, because that’s the kind they sell in this country.
Each bowl is a snapshot of my world, married together over high heat and soy sauce, presented as a gleaming bowl of goodness to be consumed heartily, spoonful by loving spoonful.
We try to document our existence in all sorts of ways: in photos, writing, or music, and these are all good and beautiful, but there’s something deeply human about food that traditional mediums can’t quite convey.
Fried rice reminds me of where I come from, but more so, it reminds me of where I am and where I’m headed. It’s a personal ritual that will be there in every chapter of my life, perhaps made with different ingredients, cooked in different kitchens, shared with different people — but always there.
image via https://healthynibblesandbits.com
fried rice — a delicious, unpretentious, and intimate way to contemplate the human condition