Last week I made the Basic Vegetable and Egg Fried Rice recipe from J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s The Wok cookbook.

Our current go-to fried rice is this Thai Chicken Fried Rice Recipe from Hot Thai Kitchen. Even if omitting ingredients, that recipe is our favorite. That’s the fried rice that we will inevitably compare Kenji’s recipes against.

The ingredients are straightforward: cooked white rice, eggs, onion, carrot, scallions, garlic, soy sauce, roasted sesame oil, and frozen peas.

The procedure is unusual to me in that it calls for cooking an omelette with the eggs first. They then get incorporated and broken up later. I cooked this dish twice to get enough volume for the whole family. One was as-written, the other was without onion or scallions, as my daughter (who loves fried rice) didn’t want those. Since I needed to do two batches anyways, it wasn’t hard to accommodate her.

Everyone was very excited to be done with the congee and into the fried rice section of the cookbook. This fried rice was just ok. My wife and I did enjoy the ample quantity of vegetables in it, though. I think the biggest factor when comparing it to our go-to Thai fried rice is the sauce. The Thai fried rice has five total teaspoons of soy and fish sauce where as this version only has two total teaspoons of soy sauce and sesame oil. It’s a fine fried rice, but I don’t see any occasion where we’d choose it over our current favorite.

I am cooking my way through J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s The Wok cookbook. Read more about it.