Fried Rice Finished in a Rice Cooker Without Stir-Frying, and a Soup of Charred, Simmered Leftover Vegetables

According to Ryuji, he usually makes his fried rice with cooked rice. Chinese restaurants, on the other hand, often cook rice on the firm side specifically for fried rice, and it is said that fried rice made starting from raw rice is the most delicious. This recipe brings that idea to the rice cooker. There is no stir-frying step, but Ryuji says it is "strangely, ridiculously good."

As his reason for using a rice cooker, Ryuji pointed to how hard it is to make fried rice for many people at once. With large quantities, tossing the wok becomes heavy labor. Ryuji's view is that there should be demand for a fried rice you can make simply by putting it in a rice cooker.

For the meat, he uses 200 g of pork belly. This time, he combined it with leftover pork he had on hand to make up the amount. Fried rice meat is easier to eat when it is fine, since it blends with the rice, so he chops it to roughly the size of the rice grains, also cutting it crosswise to make it smaller. He stressed washing your hands after cutting raw meat and being careful about hygiene.

He massages 2 teaspoons of soy sauce and 2 teaspoons of oyster sauce into the chopped meat. This is to create a flavor like the char siu at Chinese restaurants. When a staff member asked, "Can't you just season the water when you cook it?", Ryuji replied that the flavor wouldn't get into the meat that way. Chinese restaurants use char siu rather than raw meat in their fried rice, and char siu is strongly flavored. So seasoning the meat itself makes it more like char siu, he explained.

The rice is 2 go (300 g). He uses 2 go because mixed rice dishes cooked in the rice cooker taste better in larger quantities. Ryuji measures by weight, but he says measuring out 2 go the normal way is fine.

To the washed rice he adds 1 teaspoon of salt and 1 teaspoon of Ajinomoto. That is quite a lot of salt, but that's because you want fried rice to be salty. Of the Ajinomoto, he even says, "Without this, it isn't fried rice." Next comes 2 tablespoons of rice bran oil. Sesame oil would make it sesame-oil-flavored fried rice, so he uses rice bran oil. If you don't have it, vegetable oil is fine. It's quite a lot, but Ryuji explains that this is what gives it its fried rice character.

He fills the water to slightly below the 2 go line, because for fried rice he wants the rice cooked firm. During filming, he accidentally removed some of the oil while adjusting the water, so Ryuji added a pinch each of salt and Ajinomoto. "These fine adjustments are important," he said, while cautioning viewers not to add too much. Finally, he places the seasoned meat on top and cooks it on the regular setting. The rice cooker used in the shoot cost 100,000 yen, but he says an ordinary rice cooker is fine. The cooking time displayed was 56 minutes.

He also emphasized not opening the lid partway through. Rice cookers cook using pressure, so opening it midway will ruin it, Ryuji says.

While cleaning up after cutting the meat, Ryuji touched on the importance of tidying up. He says he often receives complaints along the lines of "It's great that my husband has started cooking, but he doesn't clean up." Many people who started cooking with Ryuji's recipes didn't originally use the kitchen. The kitchen is a shared space, so things like a knife left out make people angry and become a source of arguments. It's easy to think it's fine because you're the one doing the cooking, but cleaning up is necessary as a matter of manners, and when you're using the kitchen, he wants you to leave it clean.

Since fried rice alone would be nutritionally unbalanced, they decided to make a vegetable soup as well. What Ryuji says he "wants to teach everyone" is a soup that uses up all your leftover vegetables. This time he used about 150 g of cabbage, 100 g of enoki mushrooms, 120 g of onion, and about 80 g of carrot. All were partially used vegetables.

Cutting them somewhat small makes them easier to eat with a spoon, but you don't have to cut them small. They soften as they simmer, so roughly cut is fine, he says. He added, however, that the carrot is better cut properly. Any kind of vegetable will do.

The total comes to about 500 g. Ryuji emphasized that eating 500 g of vegetables is normally tough, but with this soup you can get it all at once. You can use up all your odds and ends of vegetables and get your nutrients too. So he wants people to turn all their partially used vegetables into soup.

Here Ryuji said that there are many people in the world who can't cook without a recipe, and that this is a shame. When a staff member said, "They can't improvise," Ryuji countered that it isn't a matter of improvising but of mindset. For example, if a recipe calls for one onion and you only have half, you don't know what to do. But if you keep cooking, things like that are easy to work around. So all you need to remember for the vegetables is "500 g," Ryuji suggests.

This time, he stir-fried the vegetables before adding water. Some methods stir-fry first and some don't, but stir-frying brings out aroma. He stir-fries them in a small amount of rice bran oil (vegetable oil is fine too) with salt and pepper. According to Ryuji, making soup by stir-frying first is a basic of Western-style cooking. The salt reduces the volume of the vegetables, and their moisture cooks off.

When the bottom of the pan starts to char a little, a toasty aroma rises, and that goes really well with the soup, Ryuji explains. Once a smoky aroma developed and smoke rose, he added 650 cc of water, and the smoke subsided.

The key issue with the soup is seasoning, Ryuji says. Vegetables don't release much umami; what they mainly release is sweetness, so sugar is unnecessary. Basically, it's better to add soup stock powder. Hondashi, Chinese soup stock, or chicken stock granules are all fine, and being able to decide based on your mood that day is what makes soup-making fun, he says.

The vegetables this time—cabbage, onion, carrot—have a strongly Western character. With this many vegetables, an animal-based seasoning makes it delicious, and by the book it would be consommé, but anything works. Prioritizing a match with the fried rice, Ryuji chose chicken stock.

Asked why he didn't use Chuka Aji, Ryuji answered, "Because the fried rice is strongly flavored." Chuka Aji makes the flavor too defined, so it's better to bring out the flavor of the vegetables, he says. The chicken stock granules: 1 tablespoon. The staff member, who said they had usually only made Chuka Aji soups in the microwave, was surprised that the flavor was so deep even though only chicken stock had been added. Ryuji explained that the reason was the stir-frying.

To finish, he adds aroma with a pepper Ryuji himself sells. You can add soy sauce, or put in animal-based ingredients like bacon. Even so, Ryuji thinks a simple soup is delicious. Since stir-frying has brought out the aroma of the vegetables, there's no need to work hard on the seasoning, he says. He also said that lately he has come to prefer simple recipes without a jumble of ingredients. If you're making a vegetable-only soup, it's better to stir-fry because it brings out the aroma. The longer it simmers, the softer the vegetables become, and the easier they are to digest, so he simmered it for about an hour.

To finish the fried rice, he uses eggs and Japanese leeks. The leek—a generous 70 g, as Ryuji likes it—is scored in an accordion pattern and then minced. This is to help it blend with the rice. Ryuji says he "likes this rice-cooker fried rice way more than regular fried rice," but says he doesn't know why himself.

He beats 3 eggs for 2 go of rice and, just before the rice finishes cooking, microwaves them for 1 minute 20 seconds. He keeps them from getting too firm, stopping at about soft-set. According to Ryuji, plenty of other people make rice cooker fried rice, but he is the only one doing it this way. The common method is to add raw eggs the moment the rice finishes cooking, close the lid, and let them set on the keep-warm setting. But that way the rice absorbs the eggs and turns soggy, and it doesn't come out fluffy and separate, so "please don't do that," Ryuji says.

There was trial and error behind this method. Ryuji looked back on how he had been working on this kind of fried rice as a challenge for some time, but the eggs never came out right, and he settled on microwaving them for a little over a minute until soft-set and then mixing them in.

Right after cooking, the inside of the rice cooker, according to the staff member, "doesn't look like fried rice at all." He adds the soft-set eggs and mixes, then adds 10 shakes of pepper, 16 shakes of garlic powder, and 2 teaspoons of sesame oil. The sesame oil is there to add a stir-fried aroma.

He then adds 1/2 teaspoon of salt and 1/3 teaspoon of Ajinomoto. Ryuji explains that this final salt plays a different role from the salt cooked into the rice. Just soaking flavor into the rice doesn't make fried rice; unless there's salt on the surface of the rice, it won't taste like fried rice. That's why regular fried rice also gets sprinkled with salt while stir-frying, he says.

Because the eggs are soft-set, they don't soak into the rice and remain as an ingredient. Without microwaving, it would end up like tamago kake gohan (raw egg over rice). Finally, he mixes in the leeks, lets the residual heat cook them through, and serves with red pickled ginger to finish.

The staff member who tasted it said it had properly become fried rice. They had been worried because there seemed to be a lot of oil during cooking, but they didn't notice it. According to Ryuji, regular fried rice uses even more oil, so this rice cooker fried rice actually needs less. For a change of flavor, they added chili oil, and the heat was a well-received match.

Of the soup, the staff member was surprised, saying it was hard to believe it had only chicken stock and pepper, and that they hadn't known vegetables could be this delicious. A soup made with chicken stock had never turned out like this before, and the charred bits gave it a great flavor, they said. Ryuji explained that charring it until it smokes adds aroma, so no other extra seasonings are needed. This char happens because of the aluminum frying pan—aluminum conducts heat well and scorches easily, he said. The staff member responded that it probably wouldn't turn out like this with a Teflon-coated pan. Perhaps thanks to the enoki, the soup also had a slight thickness.

Rather than the process that led him to the idea of making this fried rice by stir-frying, Ryuji listed its practical advantages. If there are leftovers, you can wrap them in plastic wrap, freeze them, and reheat them to eat. Because it's cooked with oil, it becomes a bit like pilaf and doesn't get mushy even after time passes. That makes it good for bento lunches too, he says. He also cited not having to toss a wok as a big advantage.

To make more, multiply all the ingredients by 1.5 and you can cook 3 go. However, in a 5-go rice cooker it seems likely to cook unevenly, so he asks that you stop at around 3 go. Ryuji estimates that 3 go makes roughly 4–5 servings, enough for a family to enjoy. Making it with normally cooked rice is of course fine too, but being able to make a large amount at once and leave it unattended is the appeal of this recipe, he concluded.

To close, Ryuji talked about his motivation for making videos. Many people cook as a hobby, and he thinks that's wonderful. On the other hand, while those of them in Tokyo never lack for food, there must be many people in rural areas who go to the supermarket a few times a week to buy a week's worth of groceries and cook from that to get by. He wants to deliver content that helps those people in their daily lives, as close to every day as possible. Lately there have been many non-cooking videos, but looking at the comments, cooking videos are the ones greeted with "I've been waiting for this," and he revealed that the episodes where he put real effort into cooking had a 99% like rate.

Regarding the soup, he added that it turns out delicious with any vegetable, such as broccoli or komatsuna. He wants to keep introducing handy little cooking methods like this soup—charred in an aluminum frying pan with a small amount of oil and simmered with water and chicken stock. Finally, he asked viewers to leave comments like "I made this" or "That was delicious," as well as requests for dishes they'd like him to make. The staff read every comment, and Ryuji says he looks through most of them as well.