I’ve recently been trying to put some new meals in my repertoire and when browsing for new ideas I’ve noticed that many recipes call for day old leftover rice instead of fresh one. Egg fried rice for example. Some people even seem to insist that it doesn’t work with fresh rice. Why is that?
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A good way to get a true understanding of this is to try making fried rice with both fresh and say-old rice. Fresh rice will become a mushy clumped up mess because it has too much moisture. Day old rice has dried. Because of this it will nicely separate and fry evenly for a much more pleasant dish.
day old rice dries out which makes for a nicer texture. fresh rice is still moist and will clump up when you try to fry it.
Its relatively easy to mess up fried rice if you have too much moisture in the dish, turns into just a rice and vegetable pulp.
Rice thats been sitting in a fridge for a day will have significantly dried out compared to fresh rice.
If you have a rice cooker and are lazy or didn’t think ahead to make rice the day before, you can achieve similar results by stirring up and leaving the rice in the cooker for an hour or so, lid off, after its finished cooking and switched over to ‘warm’ mode. That’l dry it out well it enough.
False premise? Only fried rice requires leftover rice. Fried rice is a tiny part of the spectrum of Asian food. And others have already explained why fried rice needs leftover rice.
In Asian households, fried rice is what you make with the leftover rice so as not to waste the leftover rice.
Its relatively easy to mess up fried rice if you have too much moisture in the dish, turns into just a rice and vegetable pulp.
Rice thats been sitting in a fridge for a day will have significantly dried out compared to fresh rice.
If you have a rice cooker and are lazy or didn’t think ahead to make rice the day before, you can achieve similar results by stirring up and leaving the rice in the cooker for an hour or so, lid off, after its finished cooking and switched over to ‘warm’ mode. That’l dry it out well it enough.
Its relatively easy to mess up fried rice if you have too much moisture in the dish, turns into just a rice and vegetable pulp.
Rice thats been sitting in a fridge for a day will have significantly dried out compared to fresh rice.
If you have a rice cooker and are lazy or didn’t think ahead to make rice the day before, you can achieve similar results by stirring up and leaving the rice in the cooker for an hour or so, lid off, after its finished cooking and switched over to ‘warm’ mode. That’l dry it out well it enough.
The sticky kind of starch ( amylopectin) in freshly cooked rice converts to a less sticky, hard type of starch ( amylose) when it becomes refrigerated for some time. This allows the grains to remain single instead of clumping together. This sort of texture is desired in dishes like fried rice, but undesirable in dishes where the rice sticks together ( like sushi). This is also why sushi found in refrigerated displays in supermarkets is inferior to that served fresh in restaurants.
The sticky kind of starch ( amylopectin) in freshly cooked rice converts to a less sticky, hard type of starch ( amylose) when it becomes refrigerated for some time. This allows the grains to remain single instead of clumping together. This sort of texture is desired in dishes like fried rice, but undesirable in dishes where the rice sticks together ( like sushi). This is also why sushi found in refrigerated displays in supermarkets is inferior to that served fresh in restaurants.
The sticky kind of starch ( amylopectin) in freshly cooked rice converts to a less sticky, hard type of starch ( amylose) when it becomes refrigerated for some time. This allows the grains to remain single instead of clumping together. This sort of texture is desired in dishes like fried rice, but undesirable in dishes where the rice sticks together ( like sushi). This is also why sushi found in refrigerated displays in supermarkets is inferior to that served fresh in restaurants.
The only recipe I know of that explicitly calls for leftover rice is fried rice, the one dish used in the example. Because of moisture (and lack thereof).
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