ChineseCookingDemystified

Early Look: Lao Gan Ma Fried Rice (老干妈炒饭)

Added 2024-01-29 07:00:32 +0000 UTC

Hey! So just a simple one as we were coming back from traveling around Yunnan and Guizhou.

See, one of the spots we were going around Xingyi in Southwest Guizhou – a city not too far away from Lao Gan Ma’s birthplace in Huaxi. Nice, perhaps surprisingly walkable town settled amidst some pretty stunning karst formations. I was recovering from the flu, checked our list of saved restaurants to find something as close a walk to the hotel as possible, and settled on a restaurant that specialized in Guizhou savory Tangyuan called "米厂路吕记汤圆". Wasn’t really feeling Tangyuan, and ordered their Lao Gan Ma fried rice on whim. That plus a nice side soup hit the spot pretty much exactly.

There's a lot of "Lao Gan Ma Fried Rices" out there in China, of course. But version fried rice was good – great, even (well, as great as something as common as fried rice can be). In a lot of ways, theirs was a sort of simplification of the ever-popular Guizhou Guailu ‘Freestyle’ Fried Rice. They fried in a base of lard… and in addition to the Lao Gan Ma also added in some smoked Chinese bacon, fried napa cabbage, and beans.

So coming back, we figured we'd whip up a simple recreation of the dish - which was certainly tasty - while we're ramping up for a couple more ambitious videos. Hope you give it a whirl :)