Vegetarian Meal #12: Plantain Fried Rice (Easy, Delicious, & Vegan Friendly)

April 16, 2019

Vegetarian Meal #12: Plantain Fried Rice (Easy, Delicious, & Vegan Friendly)

With a blog name like PlantainsYum, you would think I would have posted so many plantain recipes by now but this is actually going to be the first plantain related recipe post on my blog #milestones.

This fried rice was inspired by 3 different countries: Afghanistan, China, and Nigeria and as you read along you will see how this came to be.

Overall, this is a very easy meal to make and it is guaranteed to be a delight!

I like to apologize in advance because I don't offer strict measurements or cooking time. If it is something that is needed I would be mindful when creating my next meal recipe. Send me an email at mmelapintv@gmail.com with any other suggestions and/ or questions and I will be sure to get back to you.

My meal recipe serves as a guide point, I want to serve as an encouragement to get cooking, make use of whatever you have, and trust your taste buds.

📝 Ingredients Overview:

🌾1. Ripe Plantains
🌾2. Rice
🌾3. Vegetables

🌾4. Soy Sauce

🌾5. Liquid Smoke

🌾6. Chili Sauce
🌾 7. Sriracha

🌾8. Seasonings: Pink Himalayan Salt, Garlic Powder & Thyme
🌾9. Vegetable Broth
🌾10. Oil ( Extra Virgin Olive Oil & Sesame Oil)

📝 Ingredients Explained:

Cooking is always a creative, subjective, engaging process and explaining the ingredient list is important for me because I don't want the feeling that if you don't have a certain ingredient on the list to feel intimidated. You can read why I chose each ingredient and how you can work around it to making use of what you have.

🌾1. Ripe Plantains:

So many different cultures all over the world love and eat plantains on a daily basis. As a Nigerian, I have grown up eating and preparing a lot of plantains, so by now, I do have my own solid preference. To me, the perfect riped plantain is when the plantains just became sweet but still a bit firm, like plantain puberty 😄. I don't like it when it is overripe, even a little overripe and it loses a lot of its starch and becomes a bit mushy in texture (shade 🌴 to you Caribbeans 😂). I will still eat it though #NoPlantainsLeftBehind.

However, if you are new to plantains; plantains are in the same family as bananas, they are just starchier and lower in sugar than bananas. So you can judge your desired ripeness based on how you like your banana. If you need a little guidance click to watch this video: eHow Cooking Guide: How To Pick Plantains.

🌾2. Rice: Basmati Rice (Mahatama Basmati Rice)

The prefered type of rice for fried rice is a medium to long grain rice. Make sure to avoid short grain rice because when cooked they become a bit mushy and glutinous unless you like your fried rice to be mushy then do you boo 😉 .

Basmati rice is a type of long grain rice with a great aroma and a handful of health benefits (12 Benefits of Basmati Rice (No.12 is Amazing)). I feel most of the benefits may apply to the brown version of the rice then again I don't want to start white rice vs brown rice debate. Is White Rice Healthy?.

I personally used basmati because my mouth brain (yes my mouth has its own brain) was inspired by the Basmati Rice Pilaf with just Raisins I ate a couple of years ago at The Afghan Village Restaurant here in Houston. I really enjoyed the pop of sweetness the raisins brought to the rice. So you can see the plantains serves as a sweet equivalent to the raisins.

🌾3. Vegetables: Red Onions, Green Onions, Garlic, Red Serrano Pepper, Cabbage, Mushrooms (yes, it is not a vegetable ), Carrots, Eggplant also Broccoli & Cauliflower (Pinnacle Foods Birds Eye Steamfresh Broccoli & Cauliflower).

Please don't get intimidated by the number of veggies I used. You could just one or two of the veggies I added. For me I love vegetables and I feel the more the better, well in good reason. Also, veggies don't live forever either you use them or lose them.

🌾4. Soy Sauce (Kikkoman Soy Sauce)

In America when most people think of fried rice they immediately think Chinese but a lot of cultures have their own fried rice. As a Nigerian, we have our own fried rice and flavour wise it is not similar to the Chinese type. But I was inspired to make this plantain fried rice in the flavour of Chinese fried rice and for that, you will need soy sauce. A healthier alternative to soy sauce would be Liquid Aminos and I highly recommend getting Coconut Secret Coconut Aminos Organic Soy-Free Seasoning Sauce. Sorry Kikkoman, If I had that available I would have used that instead.

🌾5. Liquid Smoke (Colgin Natural Hickory Liquid Smoke)

I don't know if you have ever heard of liquid smoke but you need this in your life. This is something you should add into your pantry right now. It is about $1 and some change and it will change your life, especially at least upgrade your vegetable game. It added a great flavour to this meal that for me it is very important to the recipe but if you don't have it or can't get a hold of one I guess it's okay. If you are going use the Coconut Secret Coconut Aminos Organic Soy-Free Seasoning Sauce. I think you can give the liquid smoke a pass because that Coconut Secret Liquid Aminos can make a rock taste good.

🌾6. Chili Sauce (Polar Chili Sauce)

This item is not necessary. I got this sauce when I had my 'I want to start making homemade spring rolls' phase. I made them once and now I am left with empty spring roll wrappers and this sauce.

A balance of sweet, sour, spicy, bitter, and salty are important in Chinese cooking (The Importance of Yin-Yang Philosophy in Chinese Food) and in this case, this sauce re-enforced the elements of something sweet and spicy and a bit sour, kind of like me 😉.

🌾 7. Sriracha

speaking about the balance of taste elements in Chinese cooking, Sriracha says hello. Sriracha is a paste made out of chilli peppers, distilled vinegar, garlic, sugar, and salt. Sriracha is a beloved chilli sauce but any kind of hot sauce will work for those who like it hot 🌶.

So far you see that I have Serrano Chilli Peppers with the seeds, Chilli Sauce, and now Sriracha, you are probably thinking like 'guuuuurrlllll you want to kill us!' Overall even with this 3 hot elements it actually wasn't as hot as you think and of course, you can dial the heat as low or as high as you want.

🌾8. Seasonings:
Pink Himalayan Salt (Olde Thompson Pink Himalayan Salt),
Garlic Powder (Great Value Garlic Powder) &
Thyme (Member's Mark Organic Thyme Leaf )

Seasonings are not that important in this recipe, only the minimum needed.

- Since I used soy sauce and vegetable broth which has a decent amount of sodium in them, so salt is not necessary but I added a little for taste. So adding the salt will be up to your taste buds. If at the end you didn't add salt and you feel it is a little bland you can always add more soy sauce.

- I added Garlic powder because I love garlic and thyme because I always got time for a little thyme. It is a great aromatic herb that adds a great flavour to any dish.

- I just want to remind you again that you don't need so many seasonings and if you want to add any more just be careful that it doesn't change the flavour profile. I remember when I used to make Chinese fried rice in the past and wondered why it tasted more like Jollof Rice (a type of Nigerian dish), well because I added all these random seasonings more popular with Nigerian cooking. No wonder Einstein.

🌾9. Vegetable Broth (Sams Club Organic Vegetable Broth)

Whether homemade or store bought, a Vegetable broth is a cooking essential to have in your fridge or pantry. It is relatively inexpensive to buy depending on how fancy the make is. In this meal, the vegetable broth is important in 2 ways because it can replace the usage of oil and it adds a more flavourful liquid to the meal so lessens the usage of the soy sauce. if you don't have any veggie broth handy it is okay you can add a little water to your soy sauce.

🌾10. Oil:
Extra Virgin Olive Oil (Member's Mark Extra Virgin Olive Oil)
and Sesame Oil (SUN LUCK Pure Sesame Oil)

In Chinese stir fry, the preferred oil is oil that is a bit nutty in flavour with a high smoke point like soybean oil, vegetable oil, or peanut oil, although extra virgin olive oil doesn't have the highest smoke point, I used it because I got 3 L OF IT! So I am going to use it for everything. The sesame oil was added because I had it on hand and it also lends to adding a bit of a nutty flavour.
Here is a cheat list below of the best oil to use for stir fry from The Spruce Eats. You can also check out this list of oil smoke points to see if the oil you have can really handle the heat Template: Smoke point of cooking oils.

- 🔥Cooking🔥-
🍚The best rice to use for stir-fried rice is about a day old rice, remember not too old don't want a serious case of Bacillus cereus (hehe had to throw in a microbiology joke). The reason why old rice is better is that older rice is more experience, more passionate, more....... just kidding well because warm freshly cooked rice will end up being soggy and it will end up losing some of that individual grain texture.

If you don't have any old rice laying around, it is not the end of the world. Just macgyver old rice by rinsing the freshly boiled rice in cold water to stop the cooking process and get rid of extra starch that gums up the rice and put it in the fridge as you do the other preparations of the meal.

I used a rice cooker to cook the 🌾Basmati Rice (Mahatma Basmati Rice)
because you know its a rice cooker.
If you want to try another method like the normal pot way you can of course and the link below shows you how a professional chef does it.
Perfect Basmati Rice - Once Upon a Chef

🍚 Plantain Time!
There are so many ways to cut a plantain but for this meal having them cut into little pieces is ideal so you can get a bit of plantain in every bite of rice. It is the star of the show.

They are two ways I usually use to cut them into little pieces.

you can also figure out your own way of cutting them into smaller pieces, you Macgyver you. After cutting them up, I proceed to fry them.

I turned on the stove and poured a bit of 🌾Extra Virgin Olive Oil (Member's Mark Extra Virgin Olive Oil) on the pan. (Please you don't need a gallon of oil to fry plantains. The excessive oil used in frying plantains takes something that is relatively healthy into a different level).

If you want to skip out on using oil to fry the plantains you can which I did with another batch of the plantains. Just use an oil-free non-stick spray to coat the pan, and place the plantains on the pan. It will "fry up" just as well just, it will have more of a roasted plantain taste. Be careful they char easily without oil, you may notice that I charred some of the plantains. This is PlantainsYum, not Martha Stewart Yum. We may not look perfect but we taste good okay 😝

🍚 So by now you have your cooked rice, vegetables cut, and plantains fried. Now it is time to mix them all up. I started the process by heating the 🌾Extra Virgin Olive Oil (Member's Mark Extra Virgin Olive Oil) in the pan. Sorry for the lack if measurement but I want to leave that to your discretion. I used a little more oil than I usually do to cook but it was all good for me. You can go oil-less by using veggie broth to sautee the veggies.

after allowing the oil to heat up a bit, out of the veggies, I added the Red Onions and Green Onions / Chives first so they can flavour the oil. Remember to save some raw Green Onions / Chives to add as a topping to the cooked rice, it is kind of a fried rice thing to do. I actually forgot to leave some behind because I am human and I forget things.

I let the onions to sweat it out in the oil for about 5-7 mins. I didn't leave the red onions to be completely translucent, because it was still going to get more time in the heat

after giving the Red and Green Onions their v.i.p moment, I then threw in the rest of the veggies I chopped up (Garlic, Red Serrano Peppers, Cabbage, Carrot, Eggplant, & the fun-guy of the bunch Mushroom) and stirred them up.

Next is to throw everything else in, a careful throw.

I poured 3 caps full of the Sesame Oil (SUN LUCK Pure Sesame Oil)

As I stated earlier about not measuring, sorry. In using the Soy Sauce (Kikkoman Soy Sauce) as you know that soy sauce is a flavour delcious sodium machine, so use it with caution. To get the sodium machine going to flavour town, I started by using 4 caps full of the Soy Sauce. I knew I will add more later whenneeded.

Poured in a bit of the Vegetable Broth about 1/2 a cup, I stirred and tasted and tasted to taste how salty everything tasted. It tasted fine but I felt it needed just a pinch of salt.

So I added a pinch of the Himalayan Pink Salt to bring the taste all together. A a small amount of salt as pictured below because I knew after I added the rice I may be adding more Soy Sauce so I didn't want to overdo it.

At this point, I remembered the liquid smoke which was the first thing I was supposed to add to saute the vegetables. But honestly, it doesn't matter the order. The most important is that you taste along the way and let things sit in the heat for a little bit so the different components can get to know each other well.

Then I threw in a bit of Garlic Poweder (actually a little extra, cause I love garlic), a pinch of Thyme. I stirred and tasted to make sure this made sense. Then I added a little heat reinforcement the Chilli Sauce (not pictured) and Sriracha.

After adding all the Sauces and Seasonings. I stirred and let everything cook for a bit for 5 mins. I actually meant to add the plantain to the sauce but I forgot and added the rice then the plantains. , mixing it , then added the plantains. Its okay everything still worked out deliciously looking back that is the only thing I would have changed.

After mixing in the plantains, I gave it the last taste to see if I needed to add soy sauce and I added a little extra soy sauce and let it rest on low heat for less than 5 mins. That was it!

Then I remembered about the Broccoli & Cauliflower (Pinnacle Foods Birds Eye Steamfresh Broccoli & Cauliflower) . I popped it in the microwave and it to the fried rice and now this was the final end.