Bacon and Egg Fried Rice

I love rice and I especially love it for breakfast. Always have, always will. I might have been born on the wrong continent. The Asian influence is strong: a big bowl of jook or congee is what I crave in cold weather. Breakfast all over Asia involves rice, but in America, not so much. Grits, oats, farina, other cereals, yes. Rice, no. A few specific locales (that all have exceptional cuisines, by the way) excepted, there is not much rice culture here in the US.

I took a nod from Japan in making this breakfast from rice leftover from the night before, combining Asian rice technique with good old American bacon and eggs.

Bacon and Egg Fried Rice

This is a simple fried rice that I made by frying cubed guanciale (my bacon) in sesame oil until crisp, then adding rice in single layer and letting it crisp. After that, I stirred in a few scrambled eggs. Each serving got a scattering of sliced green onions and toasted sesame seeds. This was a breakfast that was as delicious as it was easy to make.

Toasting Sesame Seeds

One of the best things about this dish in my mind is the sesame flavor from the sesame oil and the freshly toasted sesame seeds. Although I took my cue for this dish from Japan, I can almost envision it as a South Carolina low country breakfast using the locally grown Carolina Gold rice and heirloom benne (sesame seeds). 

On Being a Rice Cooker Failure

I admit it. In my six decades on this planet, I have used a rice cooker twice and twice I ended up with a miserable product. Thirty-five years ago when I was first married, we received not one but three rice cookers as wedding gifts. After giving away two of them, I tried a batch of rice in the remaining cooker. The result was terrible, "fuzzy logic" be damned. I promptly gave away the third rice cooker.

Fast forward to the restaurant era some 15-20 years later. We needed a vast amount of rice for some dinner, so I borrowed a large commercial rice cooker from another restaurant. You guessed it. That rice turned out so bad that we could barely choke it down for staff meals. That was my second and last rice cooker failure.

It's not like I don't know what I am doing. My mother taught me how to cook rice before I was in school and I have been doing it ever since, exactly the way she taught me, in a pot, on the range. When I left home for college, for the first time in my life, I had no pot in which to cook rice.

I remember saving my money and scouring the department stores for a pan that I thought would cook good rice. I was looking for a heavy pan with a tight fitting lid. And I found it in a fancy department store, in Richmond, Virginia I believe. Though I can still see the interior of that store, I no longer remember where exactly it was located.

My Rice Cooker: 2-Quart Magnalite Sauce Pan

The one that I bought, a 2-quart Magnalite anodized magnesium and aluminum alloy sauce pan with a thick lid, was wickedly expensive for my budget then. I remember thinking that I could have bought several cases of beer for the price of a pan. And that is a tough tradeoff for a college kid. Now I see that my pan is labeled "vintage" on Ebay and a few are available for collectors in the $20-30 range, a fraction of the cost of any decent new sauce pan. You know you are getting on in years when things that you have bought are now labeled vintage!

Based on how my mom taught me to cook rice back in the naïveté and absolute certainty of my youth, I knew without a doubt the one true and correct way to cook rice. Now many decades on, having seen dozens of people cook rice in many different ways, all successful, I shake my head at my no doubt belligerent know-it-all younger version. Kids!

So while I won't judge how anyone cooks rice as long as the rice turns out great, I do have one final thought about rice cookers. I may be a Luddite or I may be tight on storage space or I might be really frugal, or even some combination of all of those, but I have never really liked single-purpose cookware. I have always felt strongly that if I am going to have a piece of gear in my kitchen, it should be general purpose. Rice cookers for me seem singularly single-purpose. Hypocrisy in action: ask me about my single-purpose cherry pitter!

P.S. A quick anecdote about the know-it-all nature of being a kid. In the restaurant business, after dinner service is done in a small town, where do you go after work to unwind from the adrenaline rush of dinner, to have a couple beers, and to get some dinner? We used to end up at each other's restaurant kitchens where we'd throw together some chow and kibbitz until the adrenaline buzz wore off.

I remember being in one kitchen and needing some onions for a dish, so I went to the prep area, grabbed a couple onions, a knife, and a cutting board and started dicing the onions. I have evolved my onion cutting skills over the years and have settled on a quick and efficient method that works for me.

From over my shoulder, I heard, "That's not the way you're supposed to cut onions!" I looked up, still dicing my onion, and saw a teenage prep cook, probably not even old enough to grow a beard, a reminder of my young, cocky, know-it-all self. Poor kid did not even know that I was a chef.

So, I said, "Show me the right way then!" and he obliged. I didn't sense that he was being smug or a show-off, just that he was a naïve kid to whom the world was still black and white. I tried as kindly as I could to show him six different, equally effective ways to cut the same onion. You gotta learn some time not to judge and to keep your mouth shut, something I am still working on!