Fried Rice SMACKDOWN! Lucky Peach vs. Mission Chinese Food - Round One (Lucky Peach)

It's the event of the season, the match-up we've all been waiting for: enticing fried rice recipes from two hot new Asian cookbooks. On the left is the Chinese Sausage Fried Rice from Lucky Peach 101 Easy Asian Recipes by Peter Meehan and the editors of Lucky Peach. On the right is Salt Cod Fried Rice from The Mission Chinese Food Cookbook by Danny Bowien and Chris Ying. 

The Mission Chinese Food fried rice has a cult following and takes more than 24 hours of advance preparation – after a dedicated hunt for ingredients. You'll be required to soak salt cod in several changes of water for 24 hours, make mackerel confit in advance and fry-up the salt cod till it's hard as jerky, then shred it in a food processor. before you start. Are you up to it?

Meehan's recipe is the underdog, with no restaurant pedigree – though Lucky Peach magazine certainly has a cult following. You can put the whole thing together in a half hour, though unlike its opponent, it prefers (though doesn't require) that you use day-old cooked rice.

Both include Chinese sausage, scrambled eggs and scallions, and neither relies on soy sauce, which makes things interesting.

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Mission Chinese Food Cookbook's Salt Cod Fried Rice

We'll be judging the fried rice contenders in several areas:

–Taste: how delicious is it?

–Ease of preparation: Is it worth the time and effort?

–All-around awesomeness and wow factor

It's going to be a tough contest, and we have quite a bit of prep ahead of us, so let's get going!

Both require a trip to the Asian supermarket, though the Lucky Peach recipe offers substitutions if you can't come up with things like Chinese sausage (use bacon or pancetta), Shaoxing wine (dry sherry will do) and fish sauce (use soy sauce). For the purpose of this smackdown, I used the Chinese preferred ingredients. If you're thinking of making the Mission Chinese Food fried rice and you don't have access to salt cod, fresh or frozen mackerel fillets, Chinese sausage and fish sauce, just fuggedaboudit. Make the Lucky Peach recipe and call it a day.

Are you ready? 

After gathering all the ingredients, I started two days in advance, cooking jasmine rice beforehand for the Lucky Peach recipe. For the Mission Chinese Food recipe, I submerged the salt cod in cold water.  

A little background on the Mission Chinese Food recipe. "The spirit animal of this dish is the fried rice with salt fish and chicken at R&G Lounge in San Francisco," writes Danny Bowien, the Mission Chinese Food chef. (Wow – that was the site of one of my greatest food memories ever – a Chinese banquet ordered by Melanie Wong, one of the first friends I ever "met" online.) Bowien then riffs on the umami wonderfulness of salt cod: "I love the way it seasons and perfumes rice with a funky, fermented flavor. But I don't particularly love biting into a gnarly chunk of it. The aim of our Salt Cod Fried Rice was to capture that pleasant fishiness without the stank." His solution for his restaurant was to shred salt cod, then fry it. But customers complained there was no visible fish, "so we gilded the lily with chunks of rich mackerel confit."

OK, then – I went to work preparing the mackerel confit, which involved first filleting the mackerel I found in the Asian market. It seemed a little ridiculous to me, but it was really easy and actually quite wonderful.

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Mackerel confit

All you do is cover mackerel in vegetable or peanut oil in a saucepan and put it in a 300-degree oven for 25 minutes. Let it cool in the oil, then flake the fish into small chunks and either use it right away or cover it with the oil in a jar and store it in the fridge up to a week. It has a wonderful soft texture and lovely, lightly salty (though no salt was added), delicately fishy flavor, like a cheffy version of canned tuna. The fillet I had yielded more than the 4 ounces the recipe called for, so I'd have to think of a use for the rest of it (an amped-up mackerel-salad sandwich, maybe?). Anyway, it made me feel like confiting every oily fish I can get my hands on.

OK, first up: The Lucky Peach Chinese Sausage Fried Rice. 

As in all Chinese cooking, you definitely want to prep all your ingredients in advance, have them ready and all measured out – your mise en place. The book actually uses a master fried rice recipe, which is great, as it teaches you the technique.

To prep, I sliced Chinese sausage, measured out some frozen peas, whisked together a sauce (Shaoxing wine, fish sauce, sugar and sesame oil), beat two eggs, chopped garlic and ginger and sliced scallions. That was pretty much it – 20 minutes max. 

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The recipe calls for 3 cups of cooked long-grain rice, which you can get by cooking about 1 1/4 cups of raw rice. You put the rice in a bowl, break up the clumps with your fingers and make sure your mise is next to the stove. 

First you get your wok very hot, cook the eggs very quickly in a little oil and get them out of the pan. Add more oil, then add garlic, ginger and scallion whites (we kept white and green parts separate), cook just a few seconds, add the peas and sausage, and cook just till heated through. 

Now's the fun part. Dump the rice into the wok, toss it to mix, and use a spatula to spread the rice up against the sides and bottom of the wok, maximizing contact.

"Stir and fold once a minute" for 3 minutes, till the rice is hot and "a little charred in spots." Now pour on the sauce, toss it and continue the spreading, searing, tossing routine "until the rice is evenly colored and looks pleasantly dry." Now add the eggs back in, chopping them up and toss in the scallion greens. 

Ding-ding-ding! Finished!

Oh, man . . . heavenly! The egg is tender, and the dish is perfectly balanced, absolutely satisfying and fun. And it's big fun to make – I can't wait to do it again. Here's the recipe:

Next it'll be Mission Chinese Food's turn. Stay tuned for Fried Rice SMACKDOWN Round Two!

The Chinese lacquered roast chicken that changed my life

Now and then, a recipe comes along that feels truly life-changing. The short crust pastry for the lemon-raspberry tart I wrote about earlier this week was one for me. It wasn't a new recipe when I discovered it a few years ago – it had been right under my nose in the Chez Panisse Desserts cookbook forever, but it was new to me when my friend Michalene pointed me to it. Today it's my go-to recipe for tart crust.

Now a Chinese lacquered roast chicken has changed my life.

There's nothing more delicious than roast chicken, and every cook should have a favorite recipe for it (at least one!) in his or her repertoire. For years, my go-to roast chicken has been the Judy bird – that is the Zuni Roast Chicken from Judy Rodger's The Zuni Cafe Cookbook. It's the spectacularly flavorful, crisp-skinned chicken you have swooned over if you've ever gone to San Francisco's Zuni Cafe and ordered roast chicken for two. I will write about the Zuni chicken soon here on the blog and give the recipe, but the technique is basically this: Tuck fresh herbs under the chicken's skin, rub it all over with a lot of kosher salt, and let it sit in the fridge like that for one or two days. When you're ready to roast, wipe the chicken dry, heat a skillet on the stove, plop in the chicken, transfer it immediately to a very hot oven, and let it roast. No basting, but you  have to flip the chicken a couple times and fiddle with temperature. It always results in a fabulous bird.

When I don't plan ahead, I've used the Judy technique without the advance salting, and sometimes even without tucking herbs under the skin. It's still always excellent. I thought my abbreviated version was the simplest great roast chicken possible without a rotisserie.

So when I read about author Peter Meehan's roast chicken approach in the new cookbook Lucky Peach Presents 101 Easy Asian Recipes, I sat up and took note. "We are advocates of a hot-and-lazy approach: one high temperature, one pan, one position, one great result." He talked about how seasoning a bird ahead of time and letting it sit uncovered in the fridge lets him have an easy dinner to pop in the oven anytime in the next three days, and now I was really sitting up straight. This man is sensible! When he wrote, "I started doing this after I fell under the spell of Judy Rodger's Zuni Cafe Cookbook," I dropped the book and ran out to buy a chicken. Invoking Judy's name confers instant credibility.

In the Lucky Peach Presents 101 Easy Asian Recipes cookbook, Meehan offers three roast chicken recipes. For me, it was a no-brainer: Lacquered Roast Chicken.

Irresistible, right?

Here's the deal. This is the easiest roast chicken recipe in the universe, and the result is magnificent. 

All you do is this: Paint a chicken with a mixture of half-honey, half soy sauce, then sprinkle it with salt. Let it sit uncovered in the fridge for one or two days, then roast it in a 400 degree F. oven for 50 minutes. That's it. No basting, no flipping, no lowering and raising temperatures. Let it rest 15 minutes, then carve it and here's what you get:

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I kid you not. The skin was wonderfully crisp, the meat super-flavorful and both dark meat and white meat were perfectly cooked. The white meat was moist, juicy and delicious as the dark meat. A miracle!  I can't wait to try it again.

Here's the recipe:

Want something smashing this weekend? Pick up a chicken tonight or tomorrow, paint it with lacquer and it'll be ready to pop in the oven Friday or Saturday evening. Or paint a bird with the lacquer on Sunday afternoon and leave it in the fridge so you can roast it for an easy weeknight dinner next week. And please let us know – in a comment here – how you love it!

Meanwhile, I told Michalene about it, and what she said glued me to the ceiling: "Have you tried it on a duck?" Oh, man.

NOTE: I later made the chicken again, and it required ten minutes longer to cook – about an hour total roasting time. When it's done, the skin will be mahogany, and the legs will wiggle freely at the joints "like you could almost tear them off," as Meehan writes. The internal temperature should be 165 degrees F at the thickest part of the breast and where the thigh meets the breast. Also, when you're preparing the bird, don't worry if some of the glaze falls off the bird – it doesn't matter. That's why we have foil lining the pan.

Dreaming of spring, I cook – and eat – an entire bunch of stir-fried asparagus

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My friends will tell you I'm a little bit crazy. 

OK, maybe more than a little. This day and evening are a case in point. At 8 a.m. I was at my home computer, fiddling with a story I was trying to post online for work. I made coffee. I launched into writing a review, fearing I'd be late for my noon deadline. At some point I made a salad (with Thousand Island dressing, which I deserved, as I was on deadline) and then at three thirty or four I filed, apologizing profusely to everyone involved. Caught up with emails. Jumped into another story I'm writing, this one for Palate magazine, which I'm editing and which has to be completely finished a week from today. (Insane!)

After a while, I looked at my watch and was stunned that it was 7:30. I got up from my desk and turned lights on in the other rooms. Thierry was out, and the house was empty. What would I do for dinner? Some people might just make some pasta or something else they had around, but I wanted something green. I've been craving asparagus. And I'd been eyeing a new cookbook I thought would be fun to review: Lucky Peach 101 Easy Asian Recipes. I flipped through to see if there was a recipe involving asparagus. Bingo! Stir-fried asparagus! I got in the car and headed to the market to buy a bunch.

Oh, but wait – as long as I was headed to the store, maybe I should see if there was something else I wanted to make. I went back inside. Flipping through the book again, I landed on something irresistible: lacquered roast chicken. "Lacquered" is like a magic word for me, no way not to succumb. Further, this looks like the easiest roast chicken recipe in maybe all of history. Four ingredients, including salt (a bird, some honey and soy sauce). You paint the bird with half-honey, half-soy, sprinkle with salt. Let it sit, uncovered in the fridge, 12 hours to 2 days. Pop it in the oven, roast 50 minutes, let rest 15, and carve. Had to try! 

Bought the chicken, bought the asparagus. The recipe called for one large bunch. Drove back home.

I brought a large pot of water to a boil, added salt, dropped in cut-up veg, blanched briefly and drained. Heated oil in the wok, added garlic, then asparagus, then chopped Thai chiles, and stir-fried. Then oyster sauce, sugar, white pepper. Stir-fried. Then chicken stock, and cooked till sauce thickened a little.

"Serve on a large platter," it said, and so I did. It should have said a small platter – not a whole lot of asparagus here. The recipe said it made four servings, but I'd say two or three. OK, maybe my bunch of asparagus wasn't that big, but it was the biggest one I saw. 

I took a few picture of it, then sat at the table, poured a glass of white wine, pulled out some chopsticks, and ate the asparagus. All of it. It was very good. Try it. See for yourself.

But wait. There was more: the chicken. Spring chicken! I mixed together two tablespoons of honey and two tablespoons of soy sauce, then painted a thin, even layer on the chicken. Set the time for 15 minutes, during which I did the dishes. Ding! I painted the chicken with the rest of the marinade, then sprinkled it with two teaspoons of kosher salt and put it in the fridge, uncovered. Tomorrow or Saturday (who can think that far ahead!?) I'll zip it into the oven. 

To all a good night.