The Rich Ingredient To Make Fried Rice Irresistibly Delicious

There's one ingredient for making incredibly rich fried rice that isn't that common in traditional Asian cuisines. However, regardless of whether you're making Chinese, Japanese, Thai, or Indonesian-style rice dishes, it's a guaranteed instant upgrade for any recipe. That secret ingredient is butter — although it's not such a big secret at American teppanyaki restaurants where the chefs slather it not only on fried rice but also on nearly everything else they cook on their hibachi table grills.

The reason for this is that butter adds an unbeatable creamy richness to rice. You shouldn't make fried rice with fresh cooked rice because its moisture can quickly turn things mushy. Instead, use leftover rice to achieve that desired toasty texture where everything doesn't end up lumped together. The butter replaces moisture in dried-out rice and coats each grain with its unctuous goodness. Since butter is an emulsified fat, it helps flavors cling to each piece of rice, creating a full-bodied finish that's appetizingly glossy and fluffy.

For the best results, you can start your fried rice off with oil — use the oil to first cook your vegetables, such as onions, scallions, carrots, snow peas, and bean sprouts, and then add the rice. Toward the end of the cook is when you'll want to add things like salt, pepper, and soy sauce — as well as the butter. For this reason, it's better to use unsalted butter so that you can better control the overall saltiness of your seasonings.

The key to making extremely tasty fried rice isn't to use just any butter, but to use a flavor-packed compound butter. Benihana restaurants are famous for their chefs' death-defying knife tricks, for cooking your food at the grills right in front of you, as well as for the chain's crave-worthy garlic butter. When dining at any of its more than 100 locations around the world, you'll notice a trough of the prepared spread near the cook's station, which they frequently reach into to add to the food as they prepare it. Hip to this tip, Ina Garten always keeps compound herb butter in her fridge to use whenever she needs it.

While the exact recipe for Benihana's special butter is kept under wraps, there are plenty of copycat versions circulating online — and one on Reddit that purports to be from a former Benihana chef. That one is a very simple blend of butter hand-whisked together with garlic and soy sauce. Other varieties add lemon juice, herbs, black pepper, or sesame seeds, and some will suggest first roasting the garlic for an even more luxurious punch of flavor.

Other delicious ingredients that will upgrade your fried rice include fresh herbs like basil or cilantro, MSG, scrambled eggs, and either chili crunch or chili crisp. If you manage to not eat it all up in one sitting, you can use leftover bacon grease to revive leftover fried rice.