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Everyone always has too much rice left over from a different recipe, but basic fried rice gets a bit boring after a while. Why not learn how to make a delicious Breakfast Rice to use up your leftover rice right here?
For a breakfast that will set you up for the day ahead make sure to serve a Strawberry Banana Smoothie alongside your rice! Or for something a little more refreshing you could try a glass of Cucumber Water!
Breakfast Rice
Breakfast rice sounds like the kind of dish that you would normally get at a restaurant for brunch. Not something you would have the courage to make yourself before you’ve even had your first sip of coffee.
Rest assured, though, breakfast rice is not as complicated as it sounds. Restaurants are good at making you think they are serving you dishes that have taken hours to make and that you would never be able to recreate at home.
In the case of breakfast rice, this is not true. Even without a mug of coffee to power you along, you can easily recreate this popular brunch dish and enjoy it from the comfort of your own kitchen!
What Is The Best Rice To Use?
The rice forms the base of this dish and will be part of every bite, so you really want to make sure that you get it right. Leftover rice that has had a chance to dry out works best as it crisps up much easier.
If you don’t have leftovers and you don’t mind planning meals in advance, try cooking your rice the day before you want to use it. Then store your rice in a container in the fridge giving it a chance to dry out and reheat in the same way that real leftovers would.
In terms of what type of rice to use, really anything works. It is more a case of what you have available. Jasmine is a personal favorite but it is not worth cooking this fresh if you happen to have a different type of rice leftover and going to waste in the fridge.
How To Make Your Breakfast Rice Spicy
This recipe is ideally going to provide you with a base from which you can go on and make small changes to suit your taste rather than being something that you follow exactly.
So if you’re a fan of spice in the morning, don’t hesitate to add hot sauce and make this dish as spicy as your sleepy taste buds can handle.
In fact, this recipe almost screams out to be turned into spicy breakfast rice, as it already has all of the other key components. All that you need to do is grab your favorite hot sauce.
For those who are feeling cautious about having hot sauce for breakfast, start by adding only a few dashes to your rice once it is plated up. This way you can test whether this is something that works for you without every single bite burning your mouth.
If, on the other hand, you’re a huge fan of anything spicy add your hot sauce during the final stages of cooking so that it can be thoroughly mixed through and every bite provides that all-important burn!
Could You Eat This Dish Cold The Next Day?
This recipe is basically perfectly designed to reuse some leftover rice, possibly from a dish the night before.
However, the thing about rice is that it is seemingly impossible to be able to measure it out properly. While you may think you have the perfect amount of rice for one dinner, and enough leftovers to use to make this breakfast rice recipe the next day, you still find you have some leftovers.
Could you maybe keep your leftover breakfast rice for the next day as a light lunch, or have it as breakfast again?
Well, while ti would be great to be able to prepare this recipe in bulk and eat it for a few days, unfortunately, reheated rice should actually never be kept for the next day.
The reason for this involves a lot of complicated science, but essentially, when you reheat or otherwise cook again already cooked rice, you make an incredible amount of surface area in the rice grains, enough to harbor a frankly insanely amount of bacteria that can collect in it as it starts to cool.
Though you probably won’t die or anything, storing reheated rice for the next massively increases your risk of foodborne illnesses.
Just to be safe, you should probably just throw out any leftover breakfast rice, and make it anew the next time you want to enjoy it.
Other Meats You Could Use In Your Breakfast Rice
Once you have tried this recipe a few times and got the basic concept down, you might be looking for ways that you can start to adapt it and make it your own.
A good place to start is by trying different meats in your breakfast rice, as this does not significantly alter the recipe while still making the dish feel different enough that it doesn’t become boring.
- Diced Sausage
If you happen to have a few sausages going to waste in the fridge this breakfast rice recipe is a great way to use them up!
You can either use raw sausage, cutting them up into 1-inch pieces, and then cooking them as you would the bacon. Or you could use cooked leftovers crumbling them into your rice in place of ham.
- Pulled Pork Leftovers
Pulled pork is too good to let leftovers go to waste so why not use them as an alternative to ham in your breakfast rice?
You could sprinkle cold pork over the top of your rice for simplicity. Or if you have a little more time you could reheat your pulled pork making sure that it comes up to a safe temperature (165F) before adding it to the rice.
- Spam / Corned Beef
If you’re looking for low-effort meats that you can add to your rice then you can’t go wrong with a can of spam or corned beef.
Canned meats often get a hard time but dishes like this one are what they were made for. Refried rice, eggs, and diced spam is the ultimate breakfast combination!
Looking for more delicious Breakfast and Brunch recipes? Try these out:
• Sausage Breakfast Bake Casserole
Happy Cooking
Love,
Karlynn
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Breakfast Rice
- Prep Time
- 5 minutes
- Cook Time
- 10 minutes
- Course
- Breakfast
- Cuisine
- American
- Servings
- 4
- Calories
- 1219
- Author
- Karlynn Johnston
Ingredients
- 2-3 slices bacon (chopped small)
- 2 tablespoons sesame oil
- 2-3 tablespoons low sodium soy sauce to your taste
- 2 -4 tablespoons oyster sauce
- 5 cups cooked rice (chilled completely)
- 2 cups chopped ham
- 5 large eggs (beaten well)
- diced green onions to top
Instructions
- In a large, over-sized skillet, fry the bacon on medium-high heat until it reaches desired doneness. We like ours tender-crisp in rice.
- Add in the sesame oil, soy sauce, and oyster sauce. ( you can mix in more at the end, so start at 2 tbsp of each. I prefer 2 tbsp soy and 4 tbsp Oyster sauce, but feel free to mix it up to your liking!). Stir until all the sauces and bacon mix are combined.
- Add in the rice and fry until it crisps up how you like it. Add in the ham.
- Push the rice to the side or make a well. Add in the eggs and stir fry in that well until scrambled. Once done, mix the egg into the rice mixture.
- Fry the rice some more, taste and see if you want to add more soy or oyster sauce. Mine always needs more oyster sauce, it gives it the most fabulous flavor ever!
- Serve up in bowls and let the family top with green onions for a great breakfast.
Recipe Notes
- Old leftovers are the best when it comes to the rice, and I prefer Jasmine rice. You want the rice to be slightly dried out a bit to fry up properly.
Nutrition Information
All calories and info are based on a third party calculator and are only an estimate. Actual nutritional info will vary with brands used, your measuring methods, portion sizes and more.
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Michael Bennett says
Fried Rice is one of my favorite things for breakfast. I started eating it in college. There was a Korean breakfast diner just off campus that made the BEST Kimchee Rice Omelet. They’d layer a big soup bowl with the omelet egg, spoon kimchee fried rice inside, fold the omelet over the top, and then invert it onto a plate. The hot and sour kimchee really kicked my synapses awake, before a mid-term.
I was a little skeptical about the oyster sauce at first, but this thing is a winner. I also used Chinese BBQ pork instead of generic diced ham. Yum.