Lawson L.S. Wong

Ph.D. student (MIT CSAIL) B.S., M.S. (Stanford CS) 32 Vassar St., 32-G585 Cambridge, MA 02139, USA Tel: (617) 258-9749 Email: lsw 'at' csail 'dot' mit 'dot' edu About me Research & Publications Coursework & Other Writings Pictures

Seafood Fried Rice Casserole (焗海鮮飯)

I first made this for Graduate Student Lunch (GSL) in Fall 2009. GSL is a year-long event at CSAIL, where on every Friday, a group of 3-5 people cook lunch for everyone else, taking turns throughout the year. Free lunch and fun weekly in return for labor on one Friday! More info here. This sometimes reminds me of the Food Network show Dinner: Impossible; although, upon success, one feels that perhaps the missions in the show are not as impossible after all...

Many thanks to the recipe found here. Although the recipes sound complicated, after some decoding this dish is actually very simple: as the name says, it's seafood fried rice, mixed with white sauce and cheese, and baked. Most steps in the recipe are devoted to making the white sauce, but I decided to use off-the-shelf products.

The ingredients I used, for a yield of about 30 bowls of rice:

• 5 lbs of Thai Jasmine rice (about 10 cups of rice)
• 1 lb of frozen mixed vegetables (peas, carrots, corn)
• 1 lb of sliced mushrooms
• 1 lb of 71/90 count (cooked) shrimp
• 2 lbs of artificial crab meat
• 1 dozen eggs
• 3 jars of white (alfredo) sauce for pasta
• 8 oz of shredded cheese

The instructions accompany the pictures.

Test run, before baking. Notice the white sauce and cheese I used.	Test run, baked final product. Success on first attempt!
This is the most important component. Without rice, this dish is nothing! The key to successful fried rice is in its preparation. It is very difficult to fry rice that contains too much moisture, so cook the rice well in advance (say, the night before) and keep it in the fridge for a day. This will suck moisture out of the rice and give the correct consistency upon frying. I cooked a lot of rice - all 5 lbs (30 bowls). Unless you have a large rice cooker, this will probably take many times to cook; the easiest way is to give up on automation, and cook rice directly on the stovetop in a large pot. I used the largest pot I had and cooked 15 bowls every time. It's actually very easy and not much slower than a rice cooker. Simply measure the desired amount of rice, give 1.5 times the amount of water (slight variation depending on type of rice), and cook it on medium high until it boils; keep the heat on medium until a clear rice layer forms (i.e., most of the water is absorbed); then finally put the heat on low for another 10 minutes of so. To test, try poking through for some rice in the middle. A very important step that somehow seems to work is that after cooking, do not immediately remove the rice; take the pot away from the stovetop, and just let the rice cool in the pot (with lid on) for some time. From experience this seems to distribute the moisture more evenly in the rice and avoid sticky rice on the bottom, etc. The biggest mistake for me was using standard long grain rice I found at the supermarket instead of Thai Jasmine rice. Do not interchange this ingredient; the fragrance and consistency are completely different!
In the process of frying rice. Some ingredients you can see: cooked white rice, cooked vegetables (mixed vegetables and mushrooms), artificial crab meat, cooked shrimp, completed fried rice. Before frying the rice itself, everything else should be cooked (hence I bought cooked shrimp and artificial crab meat). For me then, the only thing I had to cook was the vegetables; this was very easy, just boil the bag of mixed vegetables and mushrooms in water for a reasonable amount of time.	Frying the rice itself is by far the most physically intense and time-consuming part of cooking this dish. Take a reasonable amount of rice (say, 6 bowls) and stir-fry it on high heat. Also make sure to furiously separate the rice, avoiding it from clumping together in the moisture. The goal is to get fluffy, separable grains of rice up to a temperature as if it were just cooked. Once this is done, add in all the pre-cooked (and drained) ingredients, and mix/fry them together! Since everything is cooked already, this is just to mix the flavors together and create a presentable dish. At the end, beat a few eggs and add that to the rice and fry it together for extra taste. Soy sauce can also be added at this point, but in this dish the seafood already is sufficiently salty. With 30 bowls of rice, I had to split frying into 4 times. It took a full hour, and I was very tired at the end. The good thing about this dish though is that the most time-consuming process, frying the rice, can be done at one's desired pace. Unlike fried rice itself, which should be served hot, since this dish still has to be baked, it doesn't matter if the batches of fried rice turn cold; this gives a nice end consistency and presentation for the dish.
The rest is simple. Here's the fried rice placed neatly in the baking dish. Pour the white sauce evenly, and mix it thoroughly with the rice. If one fancies, one can make the sauce from sratch...	The shredded cheese is then sprinkled evenly over the top. Amount and type of cheese obviously depends on consumers. Being extremely unknowledgeable about cheese, I chose the safest - Italian four cheese.
Finished products! 1 minute before I was heading to Stata. Pictures blurry in part because my hand was shaking from tiredness of frying rice.	Dishes at the serving table, waiting to be served. You may be able to make out both the English and Chinese for this dish from the sign.