oyster sauce?

I've made my own sodium carbonate (used to make pretzels, bagels glossy brown). Luckily, it's a powder, so it won't evaporate.

But it will over time decompose into sodium oxide and carbon dioxide: Na2CO3 -> Na2O + CO2.

-Paul W.

Agreed.

One of the ingredients in youtiao (Chinese crullers) is ammonium carbonate [(NH4)2CO3], a powerful leavening agent that causes the youtiao to puff up when deep-fried. You don't need an expiration date on the label for this one. Over time it spontaneously breaks down into ammonia, water vapor, and carbon dioxide. I bought some to make youtiao once and after the first batch decided it was too much trouble to make at home. I had only used a bit of the ammonium carbonate. A couple of years later I opened the bottle and it was empty.

The contents really settled during shipping.

[Jenise]

According to Joyce Chen, home-style egg fried rice in China is usually made without soy sauce. It's traditional to offer some sort of meal or snack to visitors, every Chinese home has leftover cooked rice, and so fried rice is an easy dish to whip up at the last minute. There's a bit more elaborate version that's called train fried rice because it's served on all passenger railways. This also doesn't have any soy sauce in it. Joyce Chen called it "Choo-choo Train Fried Rice" because her young children ate it better with that name.

The brown-colored version, usually with diced meat and bean sprouts, is a Cantonese regional dish. Around here it's the only version I've ever seen in restaurants. You can use soy sauce to get the brown color and flavor, but it tends to make the rice a bit mushy. Thick soy sauce does the trick. Joyce Chen recommends Gravy Master as a substitute. I've never tried that as Koon Chun thick soy sauce is readily available in Asian markets around here. I suspect that a mixture of dark soy sauce and molasses would work, too.

-Paul W.

All this makes perfect sense. Up here fried rice is never brown. But the fried rice I grew up on was because it was all Cantonese cooking. Thank you for the background--you're so handy!

Re wetness, I have no problem with that. I shake a dark soy on the rice while it's cooling, but I make no attempt to have it evenly applied. I prefer that some rice has none while other kernels get a lot. The mixture, when fried later, has more vibration to it. And of course, I add a little oyster sauce to the rice while it's cooking but that's never enough to actually colorize the food.