Why can I not make fried rice?? Help! Cooking

I'm a fairly good cook - I often just play my ingredients by ear and it comes out well, or I'll follow along a recipe and it comes out well. I only say this to illustrate that it's surprising for me to follow a set of instructions and not get the appropriate result - and this has happened to me around a dozen times with fried rice.

I love the idea of fried rice, and I love going to a Teppanyaki place and enjoying the fried rice before the meat is served. It seems like such a simple formula - Cook some rice in a rice cooker, throw it in hot oil, cook it up with soy sauce, add some very finely chopped meat, some veggies, and you have a delicious meal.

My problem is all about the rice. When it hits the oil, two things happen:

1) The rice absorbs up the oil and forms big, wet clumps of oily rice

2) Letting any of these clumps touch the pan or wok for a few seconds burns off a layer of the rice, which sticks to the pan like glue. I believe this is the starch burning like the sugar it is.

The result is that none of the rice I can end up serving has any sort of crispiness to it - it's a soggy clump from beginning to end.

I've tried a few variations:

• Washing the rice thoroughly before cooking
• Using too little water to cook the rice
• Letting the rice sit on 'keep warm' for an hour
• Letting the rice sit in the refrigerator for a day until the grains separate easily
• Steel wok vs cast-iron skillet

No matter what I do, it comes out exactly the same. Oily wet rice clumps out on the plate, crispy rice crust stuck in the pan.

Has anyone experienced this and overcome it? Is there something I am missing?

Submitted June 16, 2015 at 02:21AM by fdsdfg http://ift.tt/1Lbn7AN Cooking