pork fried rice The picture doesn't do it justice. I took a picture of a plate of pork fried rice with my cell phone just before digging in. It's not just any plate of pork fried rice. It's a little different. Before I tell you what's different, I'll give you a little background on fried rice in general.


Fried Rice

According to the Wikipedia article on fried rice, "It is made from cold leftover rice fried with other leftover ingredients…There are dozens of varieties of fried rice, each with their own specific list of ingredients." The two sentences conflict with each other.

Any specific variety of fried rice in the Philippines is not to be confused with fried rice in China or other Asian countries. Filipinos don't normally add peas, bean sprouts, celery or carrots. That is, unless the family is of Chinese descent.

I've had my fair share of the different varieties of Filipino fried rice over the past 25 years and I can tell you first hand that Filipinos don't use leftover rice. There usually is no such thing as leftover rice when it comes to Filipinos.

Pork Fried Rice

Pork fried rice is normally made with rice, other ingredients and, of course, pork. While no specific part of the pig is required, it's normally the same parts as used for chops and such. What my wife does when regular pork pieces aren't available is substitute wieners.

We call them wieners in the US, but they just call them hot dogs here. Americans know that the term "hot dog" includes the bun and the condiments, but what do you expect when one of the major suppliers of wieners in the Philippines, San Miguel Pure Foods, labels them as hot dogs. I have yet to see a package here with "wieners" on the label. Imported wieners from the US don't count.

Preparation and Cooking

I observed my wife when she was cooking this batch of pork fried rice, but I still had to ask her for details because I'm not too good at paying attention. I wanted to know how to cook this stuff when she's away. The ingredients she used were:

  • Rice (bigas/kanin) - 3 cups
  • Wieners - 4
  • Soy Sauce (toyo)
  • Garlic (bawang) - 3 cloves
  • Onion (sibuyas)- 1 medium
  • Eggs (itlog) - 4
  • Vegetable Oil

First, she cooked the rice in our rice cooker (which took about 30 minutes). Then she put a little vegetable oil in a deep skillet so that the rice would fry without burning. She cooked the rice, turning it frequently while adding soy sauce. She only added soy sauce until the rice turned golden brown. You may have heard the old saying, "too much sauce spoils the goose". It's the same thing with soy sauce and rice. The flavor of the soy sauce shouldn't overwhelm everything else.

Before she started cooking, she pre-scrambled 4 eggs and fried them all together, and then cut up the result into little pieces. She also pre-cooked the wieners and cut them up into small pieces. She crushed the cloves of garlic and minced the onion as well.

As she cooked the fried rice, she added the ingredients one-by-one, the last being the fried eggs. The entire process took no more than an hour. She cooked enough for 4 or 5 people. Me and my son ate the pork fried rice on two different nights (the second time being the leftovers, of course).