For a long time, fried rice has not held a very high "status" in people's minds. In the eyes of some, fried rice is nothing more than a way to deal with leftover rice, let alone something nutritious. Here are five tips to make fried rice more nutritious.
First, the main ingredient of fried rice is leftover rice, which is reheated once, leading to a loss of vitamins, especially vitamin B1. Therefore, its nutritional value is not as high as freshly cooked rice.
Second, after being stored, the starch in rice will undergo a certain degree of retrogradation. While the texture becomes harder, the digestion rate also slows down, making it less suitable for people with indigestion.
Soy Sauce Fried Rice
Third, in the process of stir-frying, some oil must be added, which increases the calorie and fat content of the fried rice. If you treat fried rice as a staple food, it is not conducive to maintaining your weight.
Finally, rice is rarely eaten on its own; it is always paired with various dishes to ensure dietary diversity. However, after making it into fried rice, it does not provide enough vegetables, which does not comply with the principle of dietary diversity. However, whether a certain way of eating is healthy cannot be concluded so simply. In fact, as long as we apply some cooking techniques and nutritional wisdom, fried rice can still be incorporated into a healthy diet, contribute to dietary diversity, and even become part of the diet for patients with diabetes, hyperlipidemia, and hypertension. To achieve this, you only need to use a few small tricks:
1. Increase the diversity of ingredients. When making fried rice, in addition to eggs, you can add many types of vegetables. For example, mushroom vegetables such as shiitake mushrooms and oyster mushrooms, stir-fry-resistant vegetables like bamboo shoot dice, carrot dice, celery dice, and soybean sprouts, as well as various tofu dices and boiled chicken breast cubes. You can even add a little pine nuts, chopped peanuts, chopped walnuts, and other nuts. With this combination, the color, texture, and flavor of the fried rice become more rich and varied, and the nutritional balance is also improved.
2. Reduce the proportion of white rice. When cooking rice, you might as well add various grains and legumes, such as barley, millet, and oat rice. You can also add fresh seed ingredients like sweet peas, edamame, and sweet corn kernels to the fried rice to complement it. People will be pleasantly surprised to find that coarse grains with a strong chewiness and high fiber content become more fragrant and delicious when made into fried rice.
Assorted Egg Fried Rice
3. Reduce the amount of oil used for fried rice. Rice is a starchy food that is very prone to sticking to a regular wok when stir-fried. Using a non-stick pan can avoid the problems of using too much oil and sticking. Additionally, when stir-frying, try to add oil only once. First, heat the oil to sauté the seasonings, add the diced vegetables, peas, and diced shiitake mushrooms, and stir-fry until semi-cooked. Then, add the rice and stir-fry together. Finally, beat the eggs and pour them into the wok, allowing them to evenly coat the rice surface to achieve a "golden wrapping silver" effect that is both low in oil and delicious.
4. Control the amount of salt in fried rice. Since fried rice is considered a staple food, adding too much salt can lead to excessive sodium intake in a single meal. Therefore, it's advisable to pair fried rice with various spices. Besides the most common chopped green onions, you can also use a small amount of other spices like fennel, cinnamon powder, black pepper, and curry powder to enhance the aroma and compensate for the loss of flavor from using less salt. Additionally, you can use chicken powder as an equivalent substitute for salt. Since the sodium content in chicken powder is about half that of salt, an equivalent substitution can reduce sodium intake while enhancing flavor, making it more acceptable to people.
5. Pair fried rice with low-oil vegetables. Although the rich ingredients in fried rice already include some vegetables, it is still far from the goal of 500 grams of vegetables per day or 200 grams per meal, and it contains almost no green leafy vegetables. Therefore, fried rice cannot be the entire meal; it should be paired with other vegetable dishes. At the same time, considering that oil has already been added to the fried rice, the cooking of vegetables should be low-oil, such as making green leafy vegetables by blanching, oil-boiling, stir-frying, or serving them raw.