By: Nancy Straw

Last week, we teach you how to cook the most famous Thai dessert (Mango with sticky rice). For this week, we would like to share you fried rice’s secret. Fried rice is the most common dish in all Asian restaurants. It is such a simple dish that balanced all the tasty flavors on one plate. And the variations of the fried rice are numerous. It can be prepared in an effortless way that it comes with just some eggs and green onion. Also, it could be made in an extremely fancy way that chefs cook fried rice with luxurious ingredients such as king crab legs, lobster, truffle, etc. But no matter how fancy the way people cook it, the secrets of making it the tastiest are all the same. Today I am going to share my secret to prepare the best fried rice.

Selecting the proper rice

In Asian, we define rice into long grain rice and short-grain rice. Long grain rice is commonly grown in the hot weather (low latitude) countries like Thailand and Vietnam. People give the premium long-grain rice a beautiful name, the jasmine rice. Thailand is the only country that grows the cleanest jasmine rice. At Simply Tasty Thai, to present the most authentic Thai dish to our valued customer, we only select the best Thailand sourced rice for our customers. If you want to know what is the best rice pairing with the best Thai food, please come to Simply Tasty Thai in Jacksonville. We will serve you the best Thai food in Jacksonville.
On the contrary, the short grain rice is most likely from high latitude areas such as northern China and Japan. The jasmine rice is the best ingredient for cooking fried rice because it is fluffy and less starchy compared with the short-grain rice. The short-grain rice, for example, the sushi rice, is starchier and chewy, which is not an ideal taste we are looking for while having a plate of fried rice.

Before cooking the fried rice

Using cold, leftover cooked rice is another tip from me. Left in the fridge overnight, the rice grains will firm up, making it easier to separate and decreasing the chances of your fried rice turning out mushy. If you can’t wait, air freshly cooked rice to remove moisture and refrigerate the rice for a few hours before cooking.

There sure are more tips to make a better fired-rice, but the two I just mentioned are the two essentials I never miss. If you are interested in more tricks in making a fried-rice, come to Simply Tasty Thai in Jacksonville, and talk to our owner and lead chef Nancy. We will share more with you.