Recipe: Bacon and Egg Fried Rice
So you have some leftover rice from your week of awesome “serve with rice” dishes. Know what that means? It’s time for fried rice — the perfect vehicle to use up any and all leftover rice in your fridge. In fact, it’s time for one of our simplest, most flavorful fried rice dishes: bacon and egg fried rice.
This recipe is kind of a riff on breakfast for dinner, but more importantly, it’s a dish my dad used to make often when he was growing up in Upstate New York. As the story goes, my grandma would come home from a long day at work, and my dad and his sisters would be in the kitchen making this bacon and egg fried rice for her as an after-work snack.
It’s totally representative of our Chinese-American-ness, and it’s pretty much the best thing ever. Ultimately, there’s only one thing you need to know about it: the rice is cooked in the bacon drippings. That is all.
Bacon and Egg Fried Rice
Serves 4
Nutritional Info
Ingredients
- 1 tablespoon
vegetable oil
- 3
large eggs, beaten
- 8 ounces
bacon, cut into 1-inch pieces
- 1
medium onion, finely diced
- 5 cups
cooked rice, fluffed and cooled
- 1/2 teaspoon
salt
- 1/4 teaspoon
sugar
- 2 tablespoons
soy sauce
Fresh black pepper, to taste
- 3
scallions, chopped
Instructions
Heat the oil in your wok or nonstick frying pan over medium heat and add beaten eggs. Gently scramble the eggs, remove from the wok, and set aside.
Keeping the heat at medium, add the bacon to the wok and allow it to render down and become crisp. The level of crispiness you achieve here is totally based on personal preference. Once the bacon's looking good to you, take it out of the wok and set aside, along with the scrambled eggs. Leave the bacon fat in the wok.
Add the diced onion to the wok and stir-fry until translucent. Then add the cooked rice and stir-fry for 2 to 5 minutes. Use your spatula to flatten out and break up any clumps. Add the salt, sugar, soy sauce, and pepper. Give everything a good stir for another minute or so.
When you start to see steam coming off the rice, it's heated through. If the rice looks a little dry, feel free to sprinkle in some water or chicken stock. Adding some liquid directly to large clumps of rice will also help to break them up. To finish the dish, stir in the scrambled eggs, cooked bacon, and scallions. Serve!
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