Pressure Cooked Fried Rice

from uncooked rice done in minutes!

Like most mornings, on Sunday, I was a bit pressed for time and need to whip up something really quick to bring for lunch after church.  I had some carrots, bacon and a chicken breast in the freezer; it would be nice to make a fried rice dish… only if I had some leftover rice.  Cooking rice now would take at least 20 minutes and it would be too moist to fry. 

I know that the pressure cooker makes amazing rice.  So I’ll make a pressure cooked fried rice – from uncooked rice - reinvented from these recipes.

I used ingredients that I would normally throw into fried rice.  A small onion, a few cloves of garlic, diced carrots, diced a rasher of bacon, diced chicken breast.  You can basically put anything into fried rice, I think if I had prawns and eggs it would be even better.

I sautéed the garlic and onions in the pressure cooker with some oil and butter and added the carrots into it.  Next, I added the bacon and chicken breast.  If I am using prawns or any other meat it will go in now.  If I wanted eggs in it, I’d lightly beat it and throw it in before adding the meat, so the eggs are cooked first.

Once the chicken breast pieces are not pink, I throw in 1½ cup of uncooked jasmine rice and stir until it mixes well and the rice is coated with oil.  I love sesame oil, so added a table spoon of it here. Then pour 1½ cups (equal amount of water as the rice) into the mixture.  The bacon and chicken are naturally salty, and the onions and carrots are sweet, so the rice dish already has pretty good balance here, but all friend rice needs soy sauce.  So I put in a table spoon light soy and a table spoon of sweet soy (kecap manis), the liquid should already taste pretty nice here.  The finished dish would taste pretty much like this but a little richer.  I was happy with the taste and closed and lock the lid. When the cooker reached high pressure, I put my timer on 3 minutes and stabilize the pressure by moving it to a smaller fire.  Turn the fire off after 3 minutes and release the pressure naturally.  When done, I opened the lid and leave it open for about 5 minutes so the rice would soak the moisture.

Result: really tasty firm fried rice with soft chicken and carrot pieces done from uncooked rice in less than 30 minutes, as pictured. Cooking time: about 15 minutes including the sautéing, waiting to reach high pressure, and 3 minutes on stabilized high pressure. Beautiful!

Since trying this out last week, I did this recipe few more times.  You can add all sorts of things into it, and you can even go very bare only using butter, tons of chopped garlic and ginger, chicken carcass and rice and still make wonderful chicken rice.  The rule is rice to liquid ratio: 1:1. Last but not least, a tip to open the lid immediately and remove the rice and let it "dry out" in a cooler bowl.  I have tried to leave my rice in the cooker a bit too long and it burned the bottom bit of rice.