Egg Fried Rice

Fluffy eggs, bacon, ginger and garlic are folded through perfectly steamed rice and fried with delicious Chinese seasonings to make this addictive classic restaurant dish, only better.

Prep Time15

Cook Time10

Total Time25

Course: Appetizer, Main Course, Side Dish

Cuisine: Chinese

Keyword: egg fried rice, fried rice

Servings:

Calories: 428kcal

Ingredients

2 tbs peanut oil or sunflower oil
6 eggs large, lightly beaten
1 knob ginger about a 2"/5cm piece, finely chopped
3 cloves garlic minced
1 onion medium, finely diced
5 slices streaky bacon diced
1 tsp superfine sugar caster sugar
2 tbs Shaohsing wine dry sherry is an acceptable substitute if you don’t have any
½ wombok Chinese cabbage, shredded (this will seem like a mountain of cabbage but it cooks down quite a bit
6 cups cooked rice cold (from 2 cups uncooked rice)
2 tbs oyster sauce
3 tsp Maggi seasoning notes
½ tsp sesame oil
3 scallions spring onions, finely sliced
1/4 cup light soy sauce
1 large red chilli finely chopped

US Customary - Metric

Instructions

Heat the oil over high heat in a large wok until it looks like it’s shimmering. Pour in the eggs and gently move them around, scrambling until they’re just cooked. Don’t worry if they look a bit underdone in places as they’ll finish off cooking later. Lift the eggs out onto a paper-towel lined plate and set aside (my eggs usually come out in several large pieces, which is just fine), putting the wok back on the heat.
There should be a little oil remaining in the wok from cooking the eggs – if it looks completely dry, add another ½-1 tbs. Tip the ginger, garlic and onion into the wok and cook, stirring constantly, until it softens. Don’t let it brown or you’ll have a not so delightful burnt garlic flavour to your rice.
Add the bacon and cook for a couple of minutes until it just begins browning, then tip in the sugar and Shao Xing wine and cook until the wine evaporates. Add the cabbage, give everything a stir and pop a lid on the wok for a minute or two to help the cabbage start to steam.
Once the cabbage looks like it’s on its way to softening (but not completely lifeless), add the rice, oyster sauce, Maggi seasoning, sesame oil, spring onions and cooked eggs. Give everything a good stir and slightly break up the eggs into large bite sized pieces as you go. Continue cooking for 3 or 4 minutes until everything is heated through.
Serve the rice hot with the soy sauce and chilli on the side for everyone to dress their own.

Notes

This dish is adapted from Heart and Soul by Kylie Kwong.
This quantity will serve 4-6 as main meal portions, or up to 10 as a side dish.
I generally cook my rice a day ahead, as it needs to be completely cold (beware if it’s not, you’ll end up with fried rice glue. I know this from experience). Sometimes I’ll cook extra if we’re already using rice for something else, other times I’ll steam some just for this recipe. My standard steam oven rice ‘recipe’ (for long grain varieties) is 1 cup rice to 1 ½ cups water on full steam (100⁰C) for 20 minutes, so for the below quantities I do 2 cups rice to 3 cups water and the same cooking time. I like jasmine rice here but any long grain variety will work. And I will sometimes make this with brown basmati rice if I can find it – it’s not at all traditional but I like the nuttier texture.
You’ll see Maggi Seasoning in the ingredients list here. It goes against just about ALL my minimally-processed, nutritionist-brain ideals as it’s pretty much just liquefied MSG, but after trying out everything I can think of as a substitute I’ve come to terms with the fact there’s no replacing its flavour. This is the only recipe I use it in and it is yet to do us any great harm in these small, infrequent quantities. I buy it at my local Asian supermarket - a bottle keeps for about 2 years in the pantry so I just keep it there ready for fried rice nights (my husband also likes to splash it all over most soups because he thinks I don’t salt them heavily enough, but given he’s a soup-hater in general I don’t think we can trust him).
As with most wok dishes, this comes together very quickly once you start cooking, so have everything chopped and ready to go before you turn on the cooktop.
Oh, and guess what?? I have finally figured out how to put a print friendly button on my recipes! For this and all future posts you can now click at the bottom of the post and get a nicely formatted (well, nicer than before) version to print off if you like. :)

Nutrition