why do chefs prefer day old rice over fresh cooked rice?
In: Other
Only when making fried rice. When you make fried rice, you want each grain to be dry and separate so each grain can fry in the oil. You can hack this by spreading fresh-cooked rice on a sheet pan and leaving it in the fridge for an hour+. When you try to make fried rice with fresh rice, it’s difficult because the rice is too wet, so you end up smashing it and breaking the individual grains up because it’s sticky, and water + oil don’t mix well, so when you dump a fresh batch of rice into oil, it splatters everywhere
It depends what they’re doing with it. Day-old rice is a little dried out, so it works well for fried rice specifically. If you put fresh fully cooked rice into a wok and try to make fried rice, the moisture in it will just steam instead.
But if you’re say serving it with curry or a stir-fry, you’d want the tender rice that was just cooked.
They only do for Fried Rice when you want to drop the moisture content, and it’s easy and cheap to get the main effect, though there are issues with some stale flavors. High end chefs will use a steaming method day of, but that still requires some cool down time to reduce moisture.
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