Experiment 11: Fried Rice

Figure 1.  Fried Rice.  Delish.

Introduction

What do you do when you have an extra four pounds of sushi rice sitting around?  Either you make way more sushi than you would want to eat, or you find another recipe that uses rice.  We chose to cook fried rice and created our own recipe.  After looking at some different fried rice recipes online and eating fried rice in a bunch of different restaurants, we figured out what we liked and didn't like to eat with rice, and chose what we wanted for our recipe (Fried Rice 2001, JingBat 2010).

This recipe was pretty painless to make.  Either it was a simple one, or we're getting better at cooking.  Just for fun, let's assume our neurochef skills are improving.  Here are our NFPA ratings for this recipe:

Figure 2. Our NFPA Ratings for fried rice.

Difficulty: This recipe gets a 2 because it wasn't that difficult.  Sure, you have to chop a few things, and mix a few things, but it's not that much work.  Furthermore, we had fewer vegetables to chop because we used pre-chopped, frozen carrots.  Don't judge, it saves time.

Preparation Time: 45 minutes.  We worked pretty efficiently on this recipe.  Of course, it helps to have four hands chopping and frying, but the entire production fit neatly into a 45-minute window.

Course: We ate our rice for dinner, but it could also make a great lunch.  Really, it's a fairly complete meal - chicken, rice, and vegetables.  For some people (mostly students), fried rice could even make a nice breakfast item.

Materials

Figure 3.  Vegetables: chopped, mixed, and cooking

1) Broccoli - around 8 pieces
2) Scallions - 4 stalks
3) Olive Oil - just pour some in the pans
4) Soy Sauce - 2.5 tablespoons
5) Frozen pea & carrot mix - 0.75 cups
6) Yellow Onion - half a chopped onion
7) Salt - just add some and guess
8) Rice vinegar (We forgot this one.)
9) Garlic - 3 cloves
10) Chicken - 2 breasts
11) Sushi Rice - 3 cups
12) Crushed Red Pepper - As much as you want

Procedure

Figure 4. CW from top right: rice, veggies, chicken, and pot

of unknown origin

1) Cook the sushi rice using the directions on the package.  Set aside.
2) Dice the chicken into .5 inch pieces.  In one frying pan, add some olive oil.  When the olive oil is warm, add the chicken to the frying pan and cook it.
3) Chop the broccoli, scallions, garlic cloves, and onion.  Heat some olive oil in a separate frying pan.  Add the peas, scallions, garlic, carrots, broccoli, and onions and cook them (Figure 3).
4) Add some salt and the crushed red pepper to both frying pans.
5) When everything is cooked, combine the chicken, vegetables, and rice into the largest frying pan and mix.  Add the soy sauce and continue mixing.  Best eaten hot.

Figure 5.  Everything mixed together.

Results
We were quite pleased with the very tasty results of this recipe (n=3), which was exciting because it was one of our first original recipes.  While eating, we compared our fried rice with restaurant fried rice.

At first, we thought the fried rice could have used a bit more seasoning, mainly salt.  Almost right away though, we realized that we were simply accustomed to eating salty fried rice at restaurants, and that our recipe was pretty delicious without all the extra salt.

We noted that in addition to being less salty than restaurant fried rice, our recipe was less greasy.  The only time we used oil was a small amount of olive oil in each frying pan.  When the oil looked like it was nearly used up, we added water (about one cup) to each frying pan.  Adding water prevented overcooking, kept everything moist, and reduced the amount of oil used.  Though many recipes used butter, we decided to leave it out since we weren't sure what it would add.

A third difference between our fried rice and restaurant fried rice is that we decided not to use eggs.  Rather than using some sort of egg substitute, like another thickening agent, we just left out the eggs.  It didn't seem to hurt the recipe at all.

Discussion

Why fresh vegetables taste better than frozen vegetables.

Fruits and vegetables are mostly water.  When these delicate plant products are put in the freezer, the water in their cells turns into ice crystals and expands, which causes the walls that define the structure of the cell to rupture.  Cell walls are unique to plants and some bacteria, and they serve several functions.  First, cell walls keeping the contents of the cell in place and control the transmission of molecules between areas.  Second, since cell walls are rigid, which keeps plants rigid, and therefore crunchy.  When a fruit or vegetable is frozen and its cell walls rupture, enzymes that normally break down cell waste migrate to places they are not supposed to be - remember, cell walls keep these sorts of things in place (Figure 6; America's Test Kitchen, 2012).  When said fruit or vegetable is thawed, these enzymes become active and wreak havoc wherever they have ended up.  As a result of the cell wall rupturing and enzymatic degradation, your fruits and vegetables turn into off-color, off-flavor, off-texture versions of their pre-frozen selves.

Figure 6. The effects of freezing and thawing tobacco leaves. A) Fresh tobacco

leaf cells. B) Frozen leaf cells, exhibiting extensive rupturing. C) Magnification of

B, showing collapse of cell wall (arrow).  D) Thawed leaf, showing complete

disruption of cell structure.  Borrowed from Pearce, 2001.

This seems like a problem, right?  It looks like nature's way of continuing to ensure that nothing comes easy.  Sometimes you don't have the patience to cut up vegetables when the pre-chopped frozen alternative is a few aisles down.  Or, you might not have the energy or time after a long day at work to refine your knife skills with endless chopping, slicing, and mincing.  So how do you solve this conundrum?

Fortunately, vegetable manufacturers have solved this problem for you!  When you buy frozen vegetables at the store, they come blanched (America's Test Kitchen, 2012).  Blanching is the process of dipping a frozen food into boiling water, and then removing it after a short time and putting it in cold water to stop the cooking process.  Blanching breaks down all of the enzymes that would otherwise destroy your foods from the inside out without cooking the food itself.  The vegetables therefore maintain their color and taste - this is why your peas, carrots, peppers, broccoli, and other vegetables are brightly colored when they come out of the bag.

Problem solved!

References
1) 2001. "Fried Rice." Television Food Network, G.P.
2) JingBat. April. 2010. "Meegol's Fried Rice." VegWeb.
3) America's Test Kitchen. 2012. The Science of Good Cooking. Brookline, MA: America's Test Kitchen. Print.
4) Pearce RS. 2001. Plant Freezing and Damage. Annals of Botany 87: 417-24.