Golden tip: Lap Cheung makes your rice so much tastier
Rice simple and boring? Hold on, absolutely not! Perfectly cooked rice is actually the star of your dish. And who says you can’t tweak your supposedly ‘boring’ rice with delicious flavors? For the most delicious rice, you only need to add one ingredient: Lap Cheung, which you can simply buy at an Asian grocery store.
Lap Cheung is Chinese dried pork sausage. A gigantic flavor bomb that turns your rice into a true flavor explosion. Forget all the spice jars in your cupboard: once you’ve added Lap Cheung to your rice, you won’t want anything else.
Lap Cheung
Lap Cheung is dried pork sausage packed with flavor. Those flavors are created by mixing fatty pork fat with salt, sugar and soy sauce. A kind of rose liqueur is often added to the sausages as well. Once the sausages have been compressed, they are hung in the sun to dry for hours. Sometimes they are fried or smoked. They also occasionally come in other varieties, such as spicy or lean. Of course, you can decide for yourself what you prefer, but generally the regular variety is delicious enough on its own.
Cooking with Lap Cheung
If you add a Chinese pork sausage to your rice, it releases all its flavors and aromas. How do you go about it? Simple: take 2 or so sausages and add them to the pan with uncooked rice and water. By the way, don’t cook your rice in too much water—one of the mistakes you should avoid when cooking rice—because otherwise far too much flavor will be lost. During cooking, the sausages swell and release their flavors. Is the rice cooked? Remove the sausages from the pan, cut them into pieces and mix them into the cooked rice. Drizzle some soy sauce over your dish, add stir-fried vegetables and a fried egg, and you’re done.
You can buy Lap Cheung at an Asian grocery store. For 10 to 15 euros, you’ll have a half-kilo pack at home. That should keep you going for a while!
Another tip to upgrade your rice
Prefer not to eat (pork) meat? Then we recommend another flavor enhancer that gives your rice a huge upgrade. Because honestly: a little of this stuff can already be enough for a real flavor explosion. Just give it a try.
Also read:
- This is why I don’t wash my rice (and you don’t have to either)
- Which rice goes with which dish?
- 7 things to do with leftover rice
Source: TheKitchn
