yang chow fried rice 揚州炒飯

I have been really into making some lunch time favorite dishes in Hong Kong Cantonese restaurants. Today I made Yang Chow fried rice 揚州炒飯. This is a simple dish but does has its challenges. The ingredients are quite simple and inexpensive. There are two most important attributes in a successful execution. One is achieving the fluffiness and the other nutty tasting rice without being oily.
Not just a lunch time favorite. This dish is nearly always one of the last two dishes served in a wedding banquet before the desserts. This dish is also the fried rice dishes in American Chinese restaurants derived from or try to emulate but typically fail miserably.

While the common spelling of Yangzhou I prefer to separate it into two words as Yang Chow and use the Cantonese spelling as this way is more in keeping with the Chinese words. For this dish the English and Chinese side by side for each word is Yang 揚 Chow 州 fried 炒 rice 飯. This is a Hong Kong version, and I infer the ones in Yangzhou use somewhat different ingredients.

again I retrieved a few frozen US Gulf shrimps from the freezer

these very sad looking green peas that have been in the freezer from the last time that I made this dish; I managed to revive them rather than throwing them away and ran to the store to buy a new bag; the purpose of the peas is mainly to add color

It is easy to be tempted into embellishing this dish with more ingredients but I resisted. I want it to be authentic of what a good restaurant in Hong Kong would make. I used my home made char siu which is cut into small cubes. Unlike a lot of Chinese dish, you never use soy sauce in this dish as the tainted color would just be wrong. Very small shrimps should be used so I cut my wild shrimps into small piece to approximate the small ones.

here are all the ingredients ready to be stir fried in a wok

What make the fried rice grains taste nutty is the egg. By evenly coating the rice grains with egg the result is that nuttiness of this dish. Moisture control is very important to achieve the fluffy finish with just the perfect mouth feels. I was going to use a small wok and the low power burner, but fortunately I changed my mind the last minute. I use the big gun wok and 120,000 BTU burner and very lucky that I did as the freshly cooked rice contains a lot of moisture.

With sufficient fire power the ingredients do not stick to the wok and by tossing them rather than stirring them the desired fluffiness is achieved. This also minimize the need to add too much cooking oil so the ingredients do not stick to the wok during the stir frying.

I made a super-size me serving in this large plate

This dish turned out well. I used freshly cooked Thai Jasmine rice rather than day-old leftovers. By reducing the water making the plain rice the resulting fried rice grains tastes great and has the toothsomeness akin glutenous rice. The super-size me portion has enough leftover for breakfast the following morning.