Give Fried Rice A Huge Umami Upgrade With This Japanese Ingredient

Anyone who has made fried rice knows it can be a tricky dish to get right. Starting with the absolute best type of rice, preferably already cooked and cooled down, the challenge soon becomes creating a harmony of savory flavors that impart that "wow" factor. Restaurants have the fare down to a science, using various ingredients for that perfect balance (which is why adding soy sauce to fried rice isn't always a good idea when dining out). But Takashi Yagihashi, the James Beard Award-winning chef and co-owner of Boca Raton's Kasumi, recommends using an all-too-often overlooked Japanese ingredient to level up the umami element in fried rice: miso paste.

"I would add miso paste to fried rice to make the flavor deeper, and more savory," he said. For those unfamiliar with the centuries-old ingredient (miso makes just about any food taste better), it is a combination of soybeans, salt, and grains fermented with koji (a specific type of mold used in Japanese cuisine) mashed into a paste. Soy sauce alone will give fried rice savory notes of umami, but miso packs a bit more umami punch, offering hints of nuttiness and sweetness as well.

However, incorporating a pasty substance into a dish like fried rice isn't generally going to work. The ingredient needs to be a bit more malleable to coat the grains evenly. Thankfully, Yagihashi has the perfect solution for that.

Miso may be a better ingredient to use than soy sauce for flavorful fried rice, but that doesn't mean you should forgo the salty concoction altogether. According to chef Takashi Yagihashi, it can be combined with other components to give the paste a more liquid-like consistency. "I would create a miso sauce using the following ingredients: One part brown miso paste, two parts sweet cooking sake, two parts soy sauce, one part sesame oil," he said. "Then, mix all ingredients together." Once the miso forms a sauce, you shouldn't have any problem getting it to evenly coat the entire dish.

Still, not everyone has miso paste lying around. It isn't typically hard to find in most areas when perusing the Asian cuisine aisle in the supermarket, but if you just can't wait to make your fried rice, Yagihashi has a few other palate-pleasers up his sleeve to up the umami. "Ginger, garlic, and bacon fat add umami to fried rice," he noted. "I add it at the beginning of cooking." Adding them early in the process allows the flavors more time to develop, but be mindful about using a heavy hand when tossing those ingredients in. Balance is paramount, and adding too much bacon fat or ginger could overpower the entire dish.