Pork fried rice is an excellent use of leftover pork. In addition to rice, our recipe includes bean sprouts, green onion, mushrooms, red bell pepper, garlic, eggs, soy sauce, black bean sauce, and sriracha hot sauce. But you can use whatever combination of ingredients you happen to like. The key components here are the leftover pork (you could also use chicken or beef), rice and egg.
We got this recipe from one of our most-used and well-loved cookbooks, Cook’s Illustrated’s “The Best 30-Minute Recipe.” This book is one of the best sources we have found for really good, but quick and easy meals. One of the great things about Cook’s Illustrated’s books (including this one), is that as a test kitchen (“America’s Test Kitchen,” as a matter of fact), they test out all the different components and techniques for all the recipes in the book. The resulting recipes printed in the book are the best outcomes from all the tests, and they explain why certain ingredients and techniques work better than others. We highly recommend most of their cookbooks, but especially this one for people like us who enjoy cooking (and eating) delicious meals amidst their busy schedules.
This recipe requires that you make the rice in advance and refrigerate it for at least 8 hours, otherwise it will get mushy when you stir fry. We usually make the rice in our rice cooker in the morning and store it in a plastic container in the fridge for fried rice that evening. We highly recommend a rice cooker – it’s not too expensive (you can get a small basic one for about $30) and is unbelievably convenient. Once you get one, you will wonder why you never had one before.
We use green onions in this dish twice. The white parts go into the dish early and cook for a few minutes, while the green tops go in at the very end and barely cook.
Slicing the green parts of the onion on the diagonal makes for a nice look to the finished dish and is a good size for each bite.
Slice up some mushrooms in addition to the peppers and onion. Also add a few cloves of minced garlic.
We used leftover pork tenderloin, which we chopped into bite-sized cubes for the fried rice. (Be sure to cut up the pork last, because you shouldn’t use your knife or cutting board for anything else once you’ve cut up the pork).
Our wok was a gift from Dan’s brother Sean (a/k/a our talented Web Master) long ago and shows signs of much use. Once the wok is hot, add the vegetable oil and heat it. Gently swirl the oil all around the wok while heating to evenly distribute.
After you heat the oil in the hot wok, add the lightly beaten eggs. Swirl the eggs around the wok to make an ultra thin egg pancake.
There’s no need to stir the egg at all for the first 30 seconds — instead, just keep tilting the wok around as the egg cooks.
Once the egg looks like this, you can use your spoon to cut up the egg in the wok.
Remove the cooked egg to a plate. It will go back into the rice at the very end.
Next, add more oil to the wok, heat it until it is very hot, then add the bell pepper, onion, mushroom & garlic mixture and stir fry a minute or two.
The veggies cook very quickly in the hot wok, so be careful not to overcook them or they can become mushy.
Add the soy, bean sauce and sriracha sauce mixture.
Then add the rice and pork and start stirring it all together in the hot wok.
Stir it all vigorously, as it takes some work to get the rice incorporated evenly into the veggies. Once you stir it all together, the rice mixture only needs to cook for a few minutes.
It’s time to finish the rice. Add a layer of bean sprouts.
Then the green onion tops.
And the eggs.
Give the fried rice a good stir, and taste it. If it needs more salt, we prefer to add a few teaspoons of soy sauce, followed by a final stir.
We serve our pork fried rice with a few more drops of sriracha sauce, which is spicy (a little goes a long way), but delicious. We usually serve it with frozen egg rolls that we heat up in a little bit of vegetable oil in a deep pan in the oven, so they get a little crispy on the outside. Just like Chinese take-out, but cooked at home!
Great recipe. Looks good too. Definitely gonna try it out tonight.
Lifemojo