Yangzhou Fried Rice

[designerboy01]

I heard stories of it coming from the Cantonese and that Yangzhou tried to patent this as their own. Does anyone know the real story of this?

[tk467]

I've had yangzhou chow fan may times in yangzhou. It was freakin horrible ! They should thank the Cantonese for making it edible

[designerboy01]

See this post on Fried Rice in Wiki. I know you can't believe everything written in Wiki.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fried_rice

[usr.bin.eat]

Absolute nonsense when it comes to Yangzhou fried rice. I picked up printed treatises on the glories of the Yangzhou style when I was there. While I haven't translated every character, wiki's claim that "A fried rice dish with no relationship with Yangzhou" is bollocks.

[designerboy01]

I'm going to ask around to confirm this.

[designerboy01]

I spoke to some elderly people and they told me that they remember that Yangzhou didn't have this fried rice dish back then. They distinctly remember it coming from Hong Kong.

[Jerome]

I'd heard the opposite. The cantonese version is good but much heavier and darker. Yangzhou fried rice can be so light as to be eaten instead of regular steamed rice with a whole meal.

[designerboy01]

I had eaten many versions of Yangzhou fried rice both heavier and darker, and light both in Hong Kong and Canton. Depends how much money you are willing to pay for fried rice. I also heard this story about Fokien fried rice.

[usr.bin.eat]

The local fried rice dishes that I've tried in Yangzhou were uniformly light in both color and oil. Now depending on price the ingredients will vary from fine ham to something like spam! The other standard ingredients are just a bit of egg, shrimp, and scallion.

Fukien (Fujian, Hokkien) fried rice is very different. I think that both the rice and seafood laden sauce on top should both be pale. But recently I had a disappointing version at a Cantonese restaurant that had a dark chicken gravy on top.

[Gary Soup]

"Cai fan" is also from the Huaiyang region. It's a very lightly fried rice with nothing but some green vegetables in it. Perhaps that's one of the versions you were referring to.

[Jerome]

the stuff i had contained shrimp pork chicken some vegetables,but so light as to just perfume the rice - maybe a bit of stock, no soy, no vinegar as i could taste, perhaps a bit of salt or weijing. the rice remained white in color.
very tasty.