If you’re anything like us, you love Chinese food. Ramen, dumplings, spicy ribs, the always delicious chahan (fried rice) – you name it, we’ll keep eating it so long as you keep bringing it! Chahan is, we have to admit, pretty easy to make, but even so we can never get it to taste as good as the stuff they serve in the restaurant.
But no more! A couple of writers from our Japanese sister site recently went to get some pointers on cooking great fried rice from a real Chinese-food chef. Here are his four tips for making killer chahan at home!
Our hungry writers enlisted the help of Mr. Chou, a master chef of Chinese food who is also the head chef of Gyouza no Antei, a chain of Chinese restaurants with locations in Shinjuku, Ikebukuro, and Takadanobaba. Mr. Chou has achieved the highest rank in the Chinese culinary arts and is one of the best there is – even in China. So you can imagine that he knows exactly how to make the perfect chahan.
But we don’t want to know simply how to make the best chahan, we want to know how to make the best chahan possible with the ingredients you would find at home! (Or at least an average Japanese home.) Fortunately, Mr. Chou told our writers that all you really need to make great fried rice are some eggs and green onions.
Mr. Chou’s four tips:
1. Warm your pot and heat the oil until it’s warm and then add the eggs.
2. Heat up the egg really quickly so they’re soft and fluffy, being careful not to burn them.
3. Add green onions, salt, and aji no moto (MSG) all at the same time.
4. Add just enough soy sauce that it changes color.
And that’s it! If you follow those rules, Mr. Chou says even you can make delicious chahan at home! He also adds that you can, obviously, adjust the amount of seasoning to taste but don’t add too much soy sauce. Just a little is all you need.
Mr. Chou also emphasized that you should add the green onions at the same time you add the seasoning to maintain the onions’ crunchiness.
Finally, Go, our globetrotting writer, sampled some of Mr. Chou’s chahan and was suitably impressed! He said the balance between the spices, eggs and rice was just about perfect. While we’re not all master chefs like Mr. Chou, we bet that with a bit of practice anyone could get that balance just right too.
▼ “Are you a food wizard?! Why is this so gooood?!”
Mr. Chou also recommends adding some ankake, a simple thick dressing made with imitation crab meat, cucumber, and egg whites, on top of the chahan to make it extra delicious.
You can watch the master chef at work, demonstrating how to make perfect chahan in the video below. The red subtitles which appear at the bottom of the screen correspond to the four tips above.
If you want to check out Gyouza no Antei, you can head to one of their Tokyo locations in Shinjuku or Takadanobaba.
Gyouza no Antei (Shinjuku)
Address: 東京都新宿区西新宿1-2-1 ファイブＫビル2F (Google Maps)
Phone number: (03)5323-8228
Website: Gyouza no Antei
Gyouza no Antei (Takadanobaba)
Address: 東京都新宿区高田馬場１‐２６‐５ ＦＩビルＢ１Ｆ (Google Maps)
Phone number: 050-5831-1790
Website: Gyouza no Antei
Happy cooking, everyone!
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