The secret ingredient to make outstanding hibachi fried rice at home.

Even though I haven’t perfected tossing knives in the air, making an onion volcano, or cracking corny egg roll jokes, I did discover making a healthy hibachi shrimp with fried rice last night is a simple meal to make. “Let’s go to the JAPANESE STEAK HOUSE” is our son’s request when asked to select a restaurant – and during the summertime in Myrtle Beach, forget about it. So, I  decided to skip the hour + lines and try to make hibachi fried rice at home in my kitchen. (BTW: Nakato’s is the best Japanese steakhouse in Myrtle Beach. We’ve tried them all and it is the clear winner.)

First, let’s talk about kitchen gadgets. It is quite possible that sometimes I buy things with big ideas of what I’ll create if I buy a specific kitchen gadget and then it remains lonely and unused in a dark corner of a kitchen cabinet, taking up space. Such is the case of the Spiralizer, which I was certain was going to change my entire life and I was going to make Zoodles instead of pasta noodles for my family, and we’d be so healthy and trim. I’ve never made a zoodle.

One item that I thought would never get any love, because it was my husband’s idea to buy it after reading a book on the benefits of rice, is this rice cooker. “We’ll never use that!” I thought, while I read the instruction manual on the Spiralizer.

It turns out, it’s actually one of my favorite things and we use it all of the time. It can do a lot of other things but I only use it to cook rice, which involves adding rice and water and hitting “start.” The rice cooker magically cooks the rice using “fuzzy logic” and it’s sticky, just like a restaurant, if you select “sticky rice.” Wow.

Now you might be thinking, “this is the secret ingredient to making hibachi rice at home? Rice? REALLY?” It’s not. Don’t worry. You do need rice to make hibachi rice, and the rice cooker is an amazing little machine to cook the rice for you, but cooking it in a rice cooker is not the secret ingredient.

Simple Healthy Hibachi Fried Rice Recipe

adapted from my husband’s Feed Zone cookbook, which surprisingly has excellent recipes

Are you just dying by now to learn the secret ingredient??? Your wait is nearly over… It’s sesame oil and it really gives this rice an excellent flavor. It is a rather obscure ingredient. At least, I don’t use it often but somehow have accumulated several bottles of it in my pantry, most likely due to recipes that called for it and I didn’t realize I already had some.

Ingredients

• Olive Oil
• Minced Garlic (about a tablespoon)
• Sticky Rice (two cups)
• 3 eggs
• Soy Sauce (2 tablespoons)
• Veggies: frozen peas, broccoli, corn, zucchini, mushrooms… really, take your pick.
• I also tossed in leftover chicken (or you could do rotisserie) and it was delish
• Sautéed shrimp is also a great idea
• Sesame Oil (THIS is the secret ingredient.)

Directions

1. Whisk your eggs with soy sauce. (I don’t think this is particularly necessary, you could just scramble the eggs first and then add the soy sauce to the rice, take your pick.)

2. Saute the garlic in olive oil. The temp should be medium.

3. Add the eggs and scramble. The eggs look weird if you mix with soy sauce first – FYI.

4. Add the rice and your veggies after the eggs are cooked. Toss it around for about 5 minutes on low-medium heat.

5. Here’s the secret – the sesame oil really brings this together. Toss that in – about a table spoon or two (or a drizzle in circles… I’m not precise!) and enjoy!

I consider this healthy – at least compared to Hibachi restaurants which use copious amounts of sodium and lard to cook their fried rice.