Chicken Chashu Chahan (Fried Rice)

I still had some chicken chashu leftover but not much ramen left to use it as a topping, so I resorted to the most common thing Asians would do with leftovers: make fried rice!

Given that chashu is a Japanese dish it wouldn’t feel right to whip together Malaysian fried rice with belacan or anchovies and such. So I looked around for a proper Japanese-style chahan recipe, and found an interesting one by Just One Cookbook. The original recipe uses a regular pork chashu and gave the measurement for cooked rice, but here I’m giving the measurements for making just the right amount of rice purposely for this recipe. While the recipe as written was already very yummy, I tweaked the seasonings a bit to suit my tastes. Do give it a try!

If you’re making the fried rice for dinner, I recommend you cook the rice either in the morning or the night before. Keep refrigerated in a container, and bring it to room temperature when you are ready to start cooking. To make it easier to quickly toss the rice with the rest of the ingredients, crumble the large clumps of rice into loose grains using your hands, and set aside until ready to use.

For a smoother cooking process with higher success rate of making yummy fried rice, here are a few recommendations:

• Have your ingredients ready to go. Beat your eggs, separate the white and green parts of your green onions, measure out your salt and pepper and stir to combine. If you have enough space, you can even arrange them near your cooktop in the order they need to go into the wok.
• Use neutral-flavored cooking oil, and don’t skimp on it. You don’t have to drown your rice in an oily swamp, but don’t let health-consciousness make you hold back too much either. The 3 tablespoons called for in this recipe should give you a good balance. If you want a more authentic Asian fried rice, do NOT use olive oil, or any similarly strong-flavored oils in fried rice, no matter how healthy you feel they are. Over here our cooking oil is mostly palm oil, any neutral-flavored oil most easily available to you will do just fine.
• Cook over high heat. If you’ve been keeping up with the latest viral videos of late, you’ll probably familiar with the term wok hei and its importance in making good fried rice. Heat the oil until it shimmers and perhaps smoking a little, then toss in the eggs and start cooking.
• Work fast. Because of the high heat, it most likely won’t take too long for your ingredients to cook and for you to add the next ingredient. This was basically the reason why I took zero photos of the cooking process. Perhaps next time.
• Don’t stop stirring. Keep scooping up the ingredients in the wok and toss to combine. More skilled cooks would know how to toss their rice by flipping the wok, but I wasn’t going to risk having all my yummy ingredients strewn all over the floor and cooktop with nothing much left in the wok.

With all that in mind, in a large wok over high heat, heat 2 tablespoons of the oil.

When the oil is very hot and shimmering, add the beaten egg and cook, stirring a few times, until the edges are fluffy but still runny in the center, 20 to 30 seconds. Remove from the pan immediately.

Heat the remaining 1 tablespoon of oil.

Add the chashu and cook, stirring continuously, until browned and sizzling, 2 to 3 minutes.

Add the white part of the green onions and cook, stirring continuously, 1 minute.

Add the rice and cook, breaking up any remaining clumps with the back of your spatula. Toss to evenly coat the grains of rice with oil from the wok, and until ingredients are combined.

Return the egg to the pan and cook, breaking up the egg into smaller pieces and continuously tossing the ingredients to combine.

Sprinkle the salt and pepper, and toss until evenly combined.

Drizzle the soy sauce around the rim of the pan and cook, stirring continously, until all the grains are evenly coated.

Add the sesame oil and the remaining green parts of the green onions, reserving some for garnish, and toss to evenly combine.

To serve, fill up a rice bowl to the brim with the fried rice, and gently press with the back of your rice scoop so that the rice is level with the rim of the bowl.

Cover the bowl with a serving plate, and flip the bowl over.

Set down the plate and gently lift up the bowl. The fried rice should be piled in a nice dome shape on the plate.

Garnish with the remaining green onions and enjoy!