How One of NYC's Best Chinese Chefs Makes Fried Rice

I had the three piece working for delivery,

and then what just came in?

Oh, I'm sorry.

Lemme just pop this in the fryer and then I will.

Chaotic situations. Fryer's bubbling away.

We are very much open for business right now,

so we're gonna make this happen, but it's gonna be great.

Hi, I am Eric Huang.

I'm the Chef and Founder of Pecking House

in Brooklyn, New York.

Today, we're going to make my perfect fried rice.

[lively music]

I've trained in New York as a chef for the last 12 years.

I was a cook at Gramercy Tavern and then most recently,

I was a sous chef at Eleven Madison Park,

and then when the pandemic started,

my family's restaurant got locked down,

so I started frying chicken and thus, it has become my life.

The reason fried rice tastes different in a restaurant

than the kind you have at home,

it's usually thanks to these very intense wok burners

that look like rocket fuel,

great seasoning, emulsified rice.

Every grain is gonna be covered in a light slick of oil,

and then high heat.

That's the flavor we're trying to cultivate

by using these really intense woks over here.

So this is going to be a chicken fried rice,

just like the one that my mom makes in her restaurant,

the one I grew up in.

And first step is to marinate the chicken

with a technique we call velveting.

Velveting is a technique to prepare proteins for stir fries.

It really improves their texture, keeps them really moist

and gives them a nice bouncy texture.

So egg whites, obviously, have protein

and they are slightly alkaline,

and that alkaline texture is actually going

to tenderize the protein a little bit

and that's what gives those stir fry ingredients

you get in your Chinese takeout that unique texture.

Okay.

[Eric speaks in foreign language]

[crew speaks in foreign language]

[Eric speaks in foreign language]

[crew speaks in foreign language]

Okay.

So we're gonna cut this into very thin strips.

This is chicken breast, boneless, skinless.

You can use chicken thigh, you can use whatever you want.

We're aiming for kind of like noodley consistency.

Not quite spaghetti, but maybe a little thicker than that.

What should we say, bucatini? [laughs]

So normally in a Chinese restaurant,

at least how we would do it at my mom's place,

we would freeze these, slice them on a deli slicer,

and then cut them into strips.

It's a little harder to do with fresh chicken.

Why is Chinese cuisine such thin portions of meat

whereas like a lot of western cooking is these giant roasts

and such like that?

I learned recently is 'cause China is considered

quite poor in fuel, as in like wood and combustible fuel.

So they generally prepared things

to be cooked as quickly as possible

whereas there were a great deal of forests in Europe

and that's why you can create these big fires

and baked bread and such and such.

My mom would probably tell me to cut these thinner,

but, you know, this is what we're doing here.

It'll cook very quickly.

So we have our chicken strips,

we're gonna add a little salt, some cornstarch.

Cornstarch is going to allow the protein to hold on

to a little bit moisture by hydrating,

and then we're gonna add a little baking soda.

Again, alkalinity is going to tenderize

proteins a little bit.

This is going to give it the texture

of that great Chinese American dish,

chicken and broccoli, that really nice slippery

and bouncy texture of a thinly sliced piece of chicken

that is not achievable unless you do this step.

Okay, so we have our chicken velveted.

We're gonna put this away for a second

and then we're gonna address the rice.

So day-old rice is the key to fried rice.

It's the history, you know, using leftover rice.

How would you bring it back to life

and make it something delicious?

It has crystallized, the starch in it have made it hard,

but it makes it great for stir frying

'cause it's going to be really loose and fluffy.

It's going to hold on to fat for a little bit,

and that's what gives great fried rice this awesome texture.

So this would be rice that is drying out overnight.

We got racks and racks and racks of it, and as you see

after we fluff it, we pack in these containers

and then we get ready to fry rice during service.

At home, since you're doing a small quantity,

I wouldn't worry about it too much if you got it,

that white takeout carton,

you just didn't finish your rice

from your takeout meal the night before,

it'll be totally fine, ready to fry it the next day.

We use jasmine rice in the restaurant.

All varieties of rice contain a measure of amylopectin.

It's ultra exaggerated in risotto rice

that makes it really sticky and creamy,

and then there's less of it in long grain rice,

which is why it's nice and drier and fluffy

and like in individual grains.

This is very much a really important step.

Fluffing the rice, cooking your rice

the day before at least.

Then taking the time the next day to run through it.

Massage it all into these beautiful little fluffy grains.

So if you're making fried rice at home,

and you see that it has become a congealed, clumpy mass

unappetizing is because you have skipped this step

and your ancestors would be disappointed.

[Producer] And if you run outta rice, what do you do?

Oh man, you're screwed, dude. You're [beep].

My mom's gonna yell at you. [laughs]

You can use fresh rice.

What you could do is you could use slightly less water

when you're cooking your rice.

That will prevent it from being super sticky

so you would get something that's a little closer

to the ideal texture of fried rice.

So our rice is fluffed lovingly.

I'm gonna put this in a separate container.

If I was really slick, I would do the parchment slide,

but I don't trust myself on camera, let's see.

[groans] Please hold. Yeah.

[lively music]

So we're gonna prep the rest of our ingredients.

It's really important when making fried rice,

any sort of stir fry,

that everything is as close to ready as possible.

Most things that cook in wok,

they only take about 45 seconds to a minute.

It happens really fast.

So it's really important that you have everything ready,

you're well prepared, and then you're off to the races.

All right, we're gonna make our eggs.

We're gonna scramble 'em up and it's a very inexpensive

and easy way to add protein to the dish.

It just has a wonderful texture to it.

Obviously, they're not gonna be creamy scrambled.

They're gonna be kind of firmly set,

but it eats really well

with all the fluffy rice that we're gonna make.

I said fluffy how many times today?

So we're gonna beat 'em all out, whisk them nicely,

and get them ready for our fried rice.

Some would say I should use chopsticks.

Believe it or not,

I don't have chopsticks in this restaurant.

Create dishonor and shame.

We're going to dice some onion up.

When you're stir frying vegetables,

even for fried rice, you don't want them to be too soft.

We want a texture that it still has a little bit of bite.

It's not too mushy, so can't be too small.

Kenji Lopez calls it tender crisp.

I think that's a great term.

I don't add garlic to fried rice.

I think it's a little much.

Everyone thinks like anytime you cook something Chinese,

it has to have garlic, ginger, and scallions in it.

That's not true.

Then we're gonna do our scallions.

Gonna separate them into the dark green,

and then the light green and the whites

are gonna go together.

We're gonna cook these first.

They're a little bit more pungent,

but they're gonna add a really nice foundation

of savoriness to it, and then we're just gonna finish

with the dark green part.

So it has color, has pungency, has aroma.

My mom has a Chinese restaurant on Long Island.

Her original restaurant was in Queens.

It was called Peking House.

Her and my father were servers there.

The owner sold it to my parents.

I grew up taking phone calls, takeout orders, reservations,

busting tables, learned a lot about life. [laughs]

Also going in this thing, we got peas and carrots.

Very classic for Chinese takeout restaurants,

and adds a really nice bit of color and texture.

We're gonna add soy sauce to our fried rice

to add salinity, to add umami, savoriness.

You're going to add the soy sauce around the edge

just so it cooks down a little bit,

reduces just very slightly.

You don't want it to be too wet but you do also wanna add

all that color, aroma, and salinity.

There's a very specific technique

when you're stir frying things.

You're adding your seasonings,

your liquid seasonings along the edge of the pan.

The only other seasonings besides soy sauce,

salt, and MSG.

You can't have great fried rice without some degree of MSG.

It is simply a salt. It is glutamate.

It's what activates in your tongue

and your brain to develop that flavor of savoriness.

What Japanese people call umami,

and you should have in your home, it's very useful.

So we like to add a little butter to our fried rice.

Not traditional, but rice and butter are great friends.

It works really well.

You just need a little bit,

kind of brings the whole party together,

ties the room together, if you will.

Okay, we got everything ready to go here.

Again, this has come together really quickly,

and we're gonna make some fried rice.

[lively music]

All right, we got our chicken velveted here.

I'm going to do a pass through,

and the idea here is to set the texture,

cook the chicken through obviously,

before we stir fry everything

so we have everything ready beforehand.

Then the rice comes together very quickly.

It's called the pass through just because you're cooking it

very quickly, usually you just pass it through hot oil

because you have this like

almost paper thin slice of protein,

it cooks in like 30 seconds, or you can also do it in water.

It just changes the fat content

and where you're trying to cook.

If you're stir frying something, you might want that oil.

But since fried rice, we're going to add oil

and we can just use water.

Unlike in western cooking, you're not trying to get a fondue

by searing chicken in a wok or a pan or anything like that.

You just want everything cooked ahead of time.

You get all the color and the flavor from the soy sauce

and the other seasonings.

If you didn't velvet your chicken,

you don't need to do a pass through.

You could cook it in the pan beforehand.

That's totally fine.

We are cooking this in a wok,

as it would be done in a Chinese restaurant.

A very thin sheet of either cast iron or carbon steel,

and it doesn't retain heat very long because it's very thin,

but it does transfer very quickly,

which is why we have these massive jet burners.

We're looking for something called wok hay

it's the Cantonese term literally translates

to breath of the wok.

It's that really intense heat, that almost char flavor

that you have to a lot of great Chinese cuisine,

that's difficult to replicate at homes.

It's from the intense heat, that's combusting the fats

and your fried rice and your stir fries.

All oils have a smoke point,

and you can achieve that very quickly by tossing food

through the fire of a wok burner.

It's lightly smoky.

It's lightly charred, and it tastes like intense heat

if you believe it or not.

If you have a gas burner,

you can be tossing your food through the gas burner

as we'll see in the stir fry technique.

But if failing that, you could also use a blowtorch.

All right, we have two ring Cantonese burner here

for this big wok here.

We need this wok super hot.

We want the oil to be smoking the second it hits the pan.

As you can see, it's already starting to smoke.

We're going on onions, a little bit of eggs.

You want to add the eggs first so that they set.

You don't wanna add them on top of the rice

'cause then it emulsifies with the rice.

It's an entirely different product.

Everything happens really quickly.

We set the eggs first and then everything comes together.

All right. We're going on rice.

[wok clanging]

We're rocking it against the the sides

so that we're cradling it

[wok clanging]

against the flame as much as we can.

Enough oil so that the fried rice has a bit of a shine.

We're tossing it over the flame,

over the gas burner,

[wok clanging]

a noisy affair.

All right.

Then we're gonna go in with our other seasonings,

and park it for one second.

We're gonna do some peas and carrots,

scallions, salt, and a little bit of MSG.

Fire it up again.

[wok clanging]

You always want it to be in motion,

otherwise it's going to burn a little bit.

That's not what you want.

You want charred flavor,

but you don't wanna burn your ingredients.

Soy sauce, again,

we're adding it around the side of the pan,

so it caramelizes immediately.

You want it to reduce just ever so slightly

as you're making it.

Just as we're almost finishing,

I'm just gonna add the smallest bit of butter.

Gonna give it a little shine, just my personal touch.

You can kind of learn by experience

with the texture and how it falls.

The grains are no longer hard.

They're not bouncing around the wok.

They're almost moving with it in a wave motion.

That's kind of how you know that it's ready.

All right. this is how you wanna be eating your fried rice

when it's hot, steaming, almost gonna burn your mouth.

Nice individual grains, no clumps.

Everything's kind of the same size

if you eat it with one bite.

That's good. [laughs] Ooh, hot.

It has that really lovely texture, individual grains, light,

but still has like a light slick of oil to everything.

These are nice onions, still have a little texture.

Chicken is really silky and bouncy at the same time.

To me, it has just the right amount of salt and MSG.

It does have that kind of like lightly smoky aroma.

That's really important.

Otherwise, fried rice is just kind of sad

and lacking character without it.

It's gonna be difficult to replicate exactly

the super intense heat and the cooking vessel.

But as long as you get your seasoning right,

you treat your rice right by cooking it a day

before and coating it with oil and soy sauce,

or whatever seasonings you wanna use,

it's still gonna be a great fried rice.

I don't believe in the idea of perfection,

but it is pretty good.

I think my mom would say it's pretty good.

Some classic Asian American childhood.

It's like, I guess it's all right.

You could always do better.

[lively music]