How To Cook The Perfect Fried Rice Every Single Time, According To Scientific Research

When you're talking about Chinese food in India, it's not really authentic, more of our own blend of it. One staple of the cuisine is fried rice, which is still cooked in similar fashion to the original.

And there's an actual science to the perfect fried rice, as two researchers proved.

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Two researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology, David Hu and Hungtang Ko, recently presented a physics paper surrounding the topic at the 71st Meeting of the American Physical Society (APS) Division of Fluid Dynamics. Their research focused on how the wok-tossing techniques a chef or cook uses in preparing a batch of fried can affect the ultimate taste.

Fried rice originated in ancient China between 1400 to 1500 years ago. Just like it was then, it utilises rice cooked in a wok (or a frying pan now if you prefer) at temperatures close to 1200 degrees Celsius. Of course, it's incredibly easy to burn food at that temperature, which is where Hu and Ko say the tossing of the pan comes into play.

They recorded two Taiwanese restaurant chefs while they were making batches of fried rice, and then played it back later at a much slower speed to carefully observe their movements. Each batch took both professional chefs only about two minutes to make, but Hu and ko divided them into multiple stages, each making up cycles about a third of a second long.

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Four stages involve the chef tilting the wok forwards, backwards, and side to side, all in the space of a single cycle, and while heat is still pouring into the wok from the burner beneath it. It's that constant motion, Hu and Ko say, that allows this dish to cook evenly without burning. The rice and other ingredients in it are allowed to cook, sear, and cool over and over in the span of those two minutes

Thanks to their research, the two even believe it should be possible to one day automate the process, with a robot capable of replicating the movements and timing of a chef. In fact, it might even be possible to improve the dish, if a robot faster than a human is handling the wok.

Then again, that might also just end up with rice all over the kitchen, but it's worth a thought.