Let’s be real: pork fried rice has never once given me a reason to make more bacon, and I’ve been sleeping on that for years. This bacon fried rice recipe fixes that oversight completely — crispy bacon, day-old rice, a fast scramble of eggs, and a soy-oyster-sesame sauce that ties it all together in about 30 minutes. I made it this week and it was, no exaggeration, better than any pork fried rice I’ve had in a long while.
Photo: Insanely Good Recipes
Big shoutout to Claire Wells over at Insanely Good Recipes for this one — it came across my Pinterest feed and I almost scrolled past it. Glad I didn’t. The whole idea is dead simple: take a fried rice built the right way, and swap the usual protein for something that renders its own fat and does half the seasoning work for you. Bacon fat cooking your onions and garlic instead of neutral oil is the entire trick, and it’s criminal that more fried rice recipes don’t lead with it.
Here’s how it comes together. Chop up six slices of thick-cut bacon and cook it low and slow in a cold skillet until crispy, then pull it out and leave every drop of that fat behind. Sauté half a diced onion in the bacon grease until it goes translucent, then add two cloves of minced garlic. From there it’s four cups of cold, day-old rice — day-old is not optional, fresh rice turns this into mush — stirred in until heated through. Push everything to one side, scramble three eggs in the empty half of the pan, then fold it together. Crank the heat, add two tablespoons of soy sauce, a tablespoon of oyster sauce, a teaspoon of sesame oil, the bacon you set aside, and salt and pepper to taste. Garnish with chopped green onion and you’re done.
Photo: Insanely Good Recipes
Now, full honesty here: the original recipe calls for a cup of frozen peas and carrots, and I skipped them entirely — not out of principle, I just plain forgot them at the grocery store. I fully expected to miss them and I didn’t, not even a little. With the bacon fat doing that much heavy lifting on flavor, the vegetables felt more like a garnish than a necessity anyway. If